Social History of Art

The background of this paper is the biographical relationship between the Menga dolmen and La Peña de los Enamorados mountain (a conspicuous and highly-recognisable natural formation), both part of the Antequera megalithic landscape. Our main aim is to provide a high-resolution characterisation of the Matacabras rock art shelter, located on the northern side of La Peña de los Enamorados. This is achieved through a photogrammetric topographic survey, a detailed assessment of the graphic motifs identified through the use of digital image processing and various types of physical and chemical analysis, a geo-chemical characterisation of pottery found on its surface, and a comparative stylistic analysis of its motifs. Our study suggests that Matacabras (and the site of Piedras Blancas I, located just below it), played an important role in the genesis of Menga, which perhaps makes it the most important rock art location of Spanish Late Prehistory.

This paper strives to pluralize notions of taste in relation to the canonized category of the Hindu or Indian temple. I put 'Hindu' in italics because I include Jain temples in my discussion and I put 'Indian' in italics because the architecture I discuss predates India as a nation-state and in the twenty-first century includes buildings in South and Southeast Asia as well as the Diaspora. Through a discussion of the Archaeological Preservation Aesthetic (APA) and multiple variants of the Ritual Renovation Aesthetics (RRA), new ways of looking emerge. This paper seeks to reconcile the hegemonic assumptions about art historical taste and the temple within an increasingly global environment. The main argument is predicated on temple users' practice as a form of curatorial practice in the field and provides a deep description of the multiplication of aesthetics due to increasing privatization of temple administration in India. The tenth-century cluster of temples from the Medapata region (Southern Rajasthan) serves as case study for a widespread phenomenon of putting ancient temples 'back' into worship during the second half of the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first century.

Circa 1630, the Dutch painter Pieter Jakobsz Codde, created a painting that shows little more than a young man sitting in a chair. Yet an indepth examination of the person, the design of the space and the objects located in the room reveal that different aspects of disturbances and tensions have been integrated into the presentation and open a discourse on the imagery of melancholy and acedia. The paper shows by way of example that this is not an iconographic gimmick but rather a challenge to differentiate and then decide between political as well as social meanings. Should the painting' viewer decide between temperament and vice in the meaning of the representations, he or she determines at the same stroke the defining characteristics of the subject. For while the melancholy enjoyed social acceptance, acedia remained a vice to be avoided. Decisive in this: by acknowledging one's competence to distinguish between the two states, the observer was able to prove his or her own personal good character traits. The image and the handling of the image thereby constitute a situation in which decision-making authority could be practiced and positive character traits could be solidified.

Les arts décoratifs et industriels deviennent, dans la seconde moitié du XIXe siècle, le champ d’élaboration d’idéaux sociaux progressistes liés à ces mêmes utopies révolutionnaires qui ont mené d’abord aux révoltes ouvrières de 1848, guident ensuite certains courants réformateurs pendant l’Empire et empreignent enfin la frange républicaine radicale à partir des années 1870. Imaginer les formes d’une beauté qui intègre pleinement les notions d’utilité et de diffusion élargie implique la valorisation des arts du décor et la prise en compte des modes de production industrielle. L’action de l’Union centrale des Arts décoratifs s’avère alors décisive, et ce malgré l’évolution de cette société : surgie des rangs des ouvriers d’art, elle est l’émanation, dans les années 1880, d’une nébuleuse conservatrice et néanmoins ouverte aux avancées techniques. La question du « style » des objets produits par l’industrie est cruciale, car c’est sur la capacité à inventer une nouvelle « beauté rationnelle » que repose la possibilité, pour l’individu subissant un travail d’où toute créativité a disparu, de recréer une communauté. Les esthétiques sociologiques du tournant du siècle contribuent grandement à la réflexion sur ces modalités de partage de la beauté ; c’est précisément cette beauté que l’Art nouveau tentera d’introduire dans l’environnement quotidien, confiant dans la conciliation d’art et technique.

This article is a longer note on what is a minor problem in the oeuvre of a great art historian. Its theme is E. H. Gombrich's use of the formula form follows function as the summary of his commonsense approach to the problem of style change. Although I am not sure how interesting this inquiry is in an art historical context, from the perspective of my own field of design history and of modernist design theory, Gombrich's adoption of the formula constitutes an intriguing problem.

To date, critical engagement with Arnold Hauser’s sociology of art has been confined to the field of art history. This perspective has ignored Hauser’s interest in literary history, which I argue is essential to his project. Hauser’s dialectical model, composed of conflicting realist and formalist tendencies, extends to the literary sphere. In The Social History of Art, these two traditions are epitomised by the Russian social novel and German idealism. Anti-enlightenment tendencies in German intellectual culture provide Hauser with evidence of idealism’s propensity for escapism and reaction. Conversely, he extols the Russian social novel as the naturalistic art form par excellence. Because the intelligentsia is central to Hauser’s understanding of the formation of literary culture, this paper provides an outline of his sociology of intellectuals. Through a comparison of the German and Russian literary intelligentsia, this paper shows that Hauser’s analysis of literature is often more complex than his sociological interpretations of the visual arts.

<English abstract below>
Il binomio arte-denaro esisteva anche in passato, sebbene con forme e meccanismi in parte diversi da quelli odierni. Uno dei centri del mercato pittorico fu tradizionalmente Roma, che nel diciottesimo secolo anche sull’onda del Grand Tour divenne meta prediletta di artisti, pellegrini e viaggiatori provenienti da ogni parte d’Europa. Il libro si fonda su di una ricerca d’archivio durata molti anni, che ha portato a scoprire una quantità eccezionale di testimonianze documentarie inedite sulla vita e sull’attività dei mercanti romani.  Dopo una lunga 'introduzione, ove  il fenomeno mercato dell'arte è ripercorso fin dalle sue origini medievali, il libro affronta il tema rivelando i protagonisti, le professionalità, come pure il funzionamento concreto dell'azienda: ciò vale ad esempio per la merce trattata, ovvero i quadri, la provenienza della merce stessa, il pubblico ed infine i sistemi di promozione. Il volume entra così letteralmente dietro le quinte del mondo dell’arte e restituisce un universo rimasto per tanto tempo sepolto.

Rome traditionally played a key role in the art market and specifically in the market of paintings, also for the presence of the Popes.The city gained even more momentum in the eighteenth century, when it became the capital of the Grand Tour and so the destination for artists, pilgrims and travelers from all over Europe. The book is based on archival research that lasted many years, which led to the discovery of an exceptional amount of unpublished documentary evidence on the life and activity of Roman dealers. After a long introduction, where the phenomenon of the art market in Rome is traced back to its medieval origins, the book addresses to the subject revealing the protagonists, the professional skills, as well as the concrete mechanism of the company: so, the chronology and style of the paintings, their provenance, the demand and finally the promotion systems are taken into account. The volume literally enters behind the scenes of the art world and returns a universe that has been buried for a long time.

Constatant l’abondance des études sur les phénomènes de destruction, cet essai commence par analyser la situation historiographique du début des années 1980. Au point de vue normatif de l’Histoire du vandalisme de Louis Réau dénonçant « les crimes de lèse-beauté » répondait l’Ulmer Verein für Kunstwissenschaft, qui mettait en cause l’autonomie de l’art et cherchait à comprendre pourquoi la réflexion critique se voyait taxer d’ « iconoclasme ». L’essai passe en revue les directions de recherche qui ont profité de cette ouverture et les publications résultantes, mettant en évidence leurs points communs (« agentivité » des objets) et leurs liens avec l’actualité (destruction des monuments de l’époque communiste, iconoclasme islamiste, « iconoclasme » dans l’art contemporain). Il montre enfin que la valeur de la destruction dans l’ « économie de l’attention » rend une volonté de « neutralité axiologique » illusoire et appelle à une conscience réflexive accrue de la part de l’histoire de l’art.

First shown at the sixth Impressionist exhibition in 1881, Raffaëlli’s Absinthe Drinkers represents a location, an activity, and a social type – the banlieue, drinking, and the déclassé – which, when mixed together, offered a volatile cocktail to its original audience. A detailed historical examination of the social signification of these subjects demonstrates that the core meaning of the work resides in its representation of time. Recuperating a durational pictorial temporality from mid-century Realism, the painting managed to suggest, for certain viewers, a critical alternative to Impressionism and to the intensifying restructuring of the cultural experience of time under modernity.

A study of bequests of religious objects and artwork in early modern Spain shows that women were the primary collectors of religious art.  Moreover,  their relationship to their religious objects differed in many ways from that of the men in the study.  Research based on testaments  drown up between 1505 and 1655 in Cuenca, Castile.

The goal of this paper is to offer a re-interpretation of Roman funerary portraits as mediums – archaeological objects carrying certain messages. In contemporary research, the Roman province of Syria is often described as a field to the very successful fusion of Roman and ‘Eastern Greek’ culture. The pivotal example of that fusion is illustrated on Palmyra Portraits – an extraordinary set of reliefs combining Roman, Hellenistic, and local stylistic, iconographic, and epigraphic traditions. Undeniably the funerary portrait reliefs from Palmyra are the visual and epigraphic mediums – they communicate certain values and ideas across time and space. The messages transmitted by this group of monuments were the product of complex mechanisms of cultural transformation in the region. In his ‘Empire and Communication’ Innis observes that the invention of the alphabet subversed the relationship between the center of civilizations and those on their fringes. As a result, new ideas or techniques could emerge in the marginal zones. That observation certainly applies to Palmyra where the correlation between three-lingualism and extraordinary rich artistic culture can be attested. The Palmyrene funerary reliefs are often depicted by several attributes including writing tools. The several messages concerning male identity can be read simultaneously: schoolboys, Greek and Roman citizens, entrepreneurs, mourners, and cult observers. Further, the female portraits decorated by household insignia, rich jewelry, other attributes as well as Greek and/or Aramaic inscriptions communicate the statuses of modest wife, rich bourgeoise, mother, and relation to the man-of-letters. The perfect examples of cultural dialogue and deliberate, spontaneous code-switching in the private, funerary space of Roman Near East the Palmyra Portraits give also a unique example of balance between visual and written media. The image plays here as a crucial role as text – sanctioning the position of the one that was depicted as would Innis write.

Behind every printed national biography is a board of editors responsible for finding established scholars to write the biographies. The personal and institutional networks, the scientific and ideological socialization of these authors have a significant influence on the biographical constructs and narratives they have designed, and thus also determines the information contained in the biographies. Therefore, a source-critical approach to such biography texts is necessary. This will be exemplified using a biography selected from the Austrian Biographical Dictionary 1815–1950 (ÖBL). A complementary approach for the interpretation of biographical dictionaries is analysis of the networks, which can be reconstructed on the basis of the information contained in the biographies. As part of the APIS project, biographical data is generated through the annotation of biographies of the ÖBL. This data consists of frequently mentioned names of persons, places and institutions that can be subsumed under the term " biographical building blocks ". Biographical networks can be built on the basis of this data. In the second part of the paper, different dimensions of these networks as well as ways of analyzing this type of data will be shown.

Complex, innovative and thought-provoking, Iranian art in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries offers fresh insight into a culture and society that have been much misunderstood in the West and elsewhere. In this new, comprehensive study, featuring 379 full-colour images, Hamid Keshmirshekan considers the dynamics at play for Iranian artists as they confront their cultural past as well as issues of contemporaneity and cultural specificity. He contends that the twentieth century in particular proved a crucial period in the art and culture of Iran; it was then that the legacies of tradition and modernism came under critical review, and artistic concerns revealed themselves as indivisible from ideological ones.

This paper reconsiders the meaning and function of the painting The Apparition of the Sibyl to Emperor Augustus by Paris Bordone by examining its subject in the light of the medieval interpretations of Tiburtine Sibyl’s prophecy to Octavian Augustus. These interpretations expressed in an array of texts, have been molded by the world view at the beginning of the 16th century into an eschatologicaly endowed concept of the Last Emperor, a spiritual and political leader, who, like Emperor Augustus, stands at the turn of the era, and is supposed to prepare mankind for the end of the world. This concept influenced the political ideology of the time in that European sovereigns were identified with the Last Emperor. Among them Emperor Charles V Habsburg stands out, who was addressed by his contemporaries both as New Augustus, and as the Last Emperor, especially after his victory over the Protestants at Mühlberg. The striking visual affinity between the architectural setting of the painting and the decorations of Charles V’s triumphal entries, the multiple historical connections between Charles V, the city of Augsburg, and Paris Bordone’s career support the hypothesis, that the painting is an allegorical representation of Charles V as New Augustus, and the Last Emperor, and was commissioned in Augsburg to celebrate his triumphal arrival to the 1548 Imperial Diet of Augsburg.

The social history of art, as it was reinvented four decades ago, now dominates most fields in art history. It has been an enormously productive method, yielding hundreds of fresh, nuanced accounts of the cultural and political functions of art. But what is the role of formalism in this current methodological quasi-consensus? Does social art history take adequate account of form? This essay, closely reading several exceptional books from the last two decades, argues for an expressly formalist brand of social art history. The deepest value of social art history, it argues, lies less in uncovering the social content of representations than in discovering the social content of their structures. The essay concludes that the future relevance of art history as political critique may depend on its ability to tell a social history of aesthetic forms—that is, to help us understand why certain kinds of art gain credibility, and later lose it again, as social conditions change.

First published in 1948, Frederick Antal's Florentine Painting and its Social Background was an important milestone in Anglophone art history. Based on European examples, including Max Dvořák, it sought to understand art history's relationship to social and intellectual history. When Antal, a Hungarian émigré, arrived in Britain in 1933, he encountered an inward-looking discipline preoccupied with formalism and connoisseurship; or as he phrased it, art historians of 'the older persuasion' ignorant of 'the fruitful achievements of modern historical research.' Despite its considerable scholarship and erudition, Antal's book was not warmly received, largely because he had used historical materialism to understand the production of art and the development of styles. Antal's class-based account of the social position of the artist and the role of the patron in determining the emergence of early Renaissance styles was especially controversial. However, although Marxist analysis was used to challenge the assumptions of Anglo art history, it was not Antal's intention to weaken art history's disciplinary autonomy. With historical materialism, he sought to place art history on a firmer historical footing. Most importantly, this approach was compatible with the discipline's Central European tradition, where art-historical scholarship was framed by questions of method and based on broad historical research. Without defending its more deterministic features, this article supports a re-evaluation of Antal's book, as an important forerunner of interdisciplinary art scholarship. 2 It considers why Antal's legacy has not endured, despite the 'social history of art' enjoying widespread acceptance in English-speaking art history in later decades.

En el año 1950 México desembarca en Italia. Durante la XXV Bienal de Venecia se exponen por primera vez en Europa obras del arte mexicano posrevolucionario que, desde entonces, circularán en el continente europeo a través de exposiciones y publicaciones. Concretamente en Italia, las experiencias del muralismo mexicano están consideradas un modelo indispensable para muchos artistas e intelectuales. Además,
constituyen una inspiración para el nacimiento de un movimiento de arte público que se expresa a través de la producción de murales de claro contenido político durante el período comprendido entre 1950 y 1980. Este ensayo muestra cómo el muralismo constituye un espacio de intercambio fructífero entre los dos contextos abordados,
rompiendo el estereotipo que siempre ha visto con una mirada eurocéntrica la relación artística entre México e Italia de forma unidireccional.

https://www.worldcat.org/title/william-hogarth-frederick-antal-and-deconstruction/oclc/8869028016&referer=brief_results 

Aktualʹnye problemy teorii i istorii iskusstva = Actual problems of theory and history of art : sbornik nauchnykh stateĭ = collection of articles.
Sankt-Peterburg : Sankt-Peterburgskiĭ gosudarstvennyĭ universitet : Moskovskiĭ gosudarstvennyĭ universitet im. M.V. Lomonosova, 2011-


The article assesses the potential of Post-Structuralism for the decoding of William Hogarth’s artistic strategies. Frederick Antal, the author of the fundamental monograph on Hogarth, investigated some problems of interpretation of artist’s oeuvre in terms of deconstruction mechanisms (parody, expression, caricature, critique of “grand styles”). His conception of Mannerist, a multi-level art-object, which was not elaborated in his theoretical writings, can be explicated from his art historical studies. In the present article, intuitions of F. Antal, Arnold Hauser, and other theorists are explored in relation to the contemporary Post-Structuralism. The author focuses on Hogarth’s works “Royalty, Episcopacy and Law” (1724) and “Enthusiasm Delineated” (1762). Special attention has been paid to Hogarth’s oil-on-canvas painting “The Bench” (Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge) and his engraving of the same title, examining them in the context of Modernist (Odilon Redon, Picasso) and classical (Leonardo, Michelangelo, Magnasco) art. “Deconstruction” in Hogarth’s art is interpreted in relation to approaches characteristic of the eighteenth-century culture (John Locke, Henry Fielding, David Hume, John Gay). The article is a part of the author’s project concerning the investigation of the origins of the avant-garde.

Absent Look. Edouard Manet and Timothy Clark’s Theory of Modernism //  VESTNIK SANKT-PETERBURGSKOGO UNIVERSITETA-ISKUSSTVOVEDENIE (Vestnik Sankt-Peterburgskogo universiteta. Seriâ 15. Iskusstvovedenie; Vestnik of Saint Petersburg University. Arts; Journal of Saint-Petersburg University. Art History; Вестник Санкт-Петербургского университета. Искусствоведение), 2020, Vol. 10 Issue 2, p. 266-273. ISSN: 22213007 DOI:
10.21638/spbu15.2020.205  (Web of Science Core Collection and Scopus databases).

Between 1624 and about 1635, Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665) produced a series of mythological paintings that depict women looking at passive men. Read by modern commentators as a sign of the painter's fear of women, these pictures have contributed to the myth that this artist created predominantly masculine works of art. Laying aside biographical interpretation, this thesis investigates the relationship between Poussin's representations of masculinity and femininity and the social affairs of the gentlemen who bought these paintings. In order to address fully the paintings' unusual iconography, it has been necessary to take into account the importance of femininity in the sociality that permeated Poussin's visual repertoire. I analyse how culturally constructed gendered positions of viewing informed the design of these paintings and the kinds of viewing that occurred before them. By considering the social possibilities, the pictorial processes, and the physical locations through which these paintings affected their patrons, I establish that a connection existed between social experience and Poussin's representations of gendered looking. This discussion sets the parameters for an examination of how these paintings related intimately to the familial and status concerns of the painter's Roman clientele. I aim to demonstrate that Poussin's early mythological paintings functioned within a complex visual culture where gentlemen sought to utilise representations of powerful women positively. At the same time, this thesis attempts to restore aspects of femininity to perceptions of the gender of Poussin's early artistic production.

This chapter takes Mieke Bal's concept of visual agency as a starting point to analyse Nicolas Poussin's 'Rinaldo and Armida' in Dulwich, and uses hermeneutics to trace how historical paintings can lay down parameters that determine how and what a modern interpreter can say about it. The painting's liveliness motions towards an interpretive approach to the address of the 'other' which must be grasped as an anticipation of an answer that is contained in the work itself, and where the interpreter's ego is laid aside as much as possible. Agency operates not only on an audible level but also through the visual field predicated on contradictory gendered gestures. In its historical context, this painting operated through distinct parameters that constituted the painting's intention, in terms of what was intended for it to achieve.

Zahvale Profesorici i mentorici Ani Marinković iskreno zahvaljujem na dobronamjernim sugestijama i primjedbama koje su mi uvelike pomogle da uspješno strukturiram i napišem ovaj diplomski rad. Gosparu Ivanu Viđenu, dragome prijatelju i vjernome čitatelju, puno hvala na svim razgovorima, savjetima i kritikama te, dakako, na srdačnome gostoprimstvu u Dubrovniku, Gradu kojemu se uvijek iznova rado vraćam. Posebno želim zahvaliti Sonji Bakoti, mladoj i talentiranoj povjesničarki umjetnosti pred kojom stoji svijetla i uspješna budućnost. Naposljetku, velika zahvala ide starijim kolegama Matku Matiji Marušiću i Petru Strunji koji su mi pomogli prikupiti potrebnu literaturu za izradu ovoga rada. Temeljna dokumentacijska kartica Sveučilište u Zagrebu Diplomski rad Filozofski fakultet Odsjek za povijest umjetnosti Diplomski studij DUBROVAČKE BRATOVŠTINE SLIKARA U 15. I 16. STOLJEĆU Pavle Bonča The Painters Confraternities in the City of Dubrovnik in the 15th and 16th Centuries Usredotočujući se na problem organizacije strukovnih i religijskih udruženja u razdoblju kasnog srednjeg i ranog novog vijeka, ovaj rad raspravlja o strukturi i funkciji bratovština slikara u Dubrovniku tijekom 15. i 16. stoljeća. Analizirajući kontekstualne uvjete i osobitosti razvoja dubrovačkog slikarstva, predstojeći tekst kritički sažima dosadašnje spoznaje o naslovnoj temi te na temelju povijesnih izvora preispituje i nadograđuje zapažanja starijih istraživača. Cilj je ovoga rada otvoriti pitanje datacije osnutka dubrovačkih bratovština slikara, djelomično rekonstruirati pravila bratovštinskih statuta, ispitati koje su obaveze lokalni i strani majstori morali ispuniti prema bratovštini, usustaviti popis poznatih gastalda dubrovačkih bratovština slikara te, naposljetku, obraditi problem eventualnog utjecaja bratovština na likovni izraz dubrovačkih gotičkih i renesansnih majstora. Očekivani ishod diplomskoga rada je pružiti pregled relevantnih arhivskih izvora u kontekstu naslovne teme te kroz komparativnu analizu povijesnih dokumenata i stručne literature ponuditi nove spoznaje o dubrovačkim udruženjima slikara tijekom 15. i 16. stoljeća. Rad je pohranjen u: knjižnici Filozofskog fakulteta Sveučilišta u Zagrebu. Rad sadrži: 86 stranica. Izvornik je na hrvatskom jeziku.

Since the end of the 19th century, the modernisation processes of urbanisation and industrialisation taking place in Europe and the transatlantic regions have changed not only the natural environment but also social and geographical relations. The emergence of modern states changed the traditional societies, lifestyles and private lives of individuals and social groups. It is also characteristic of this period that social reform movements appeared in large numbers-as a «counterweight» to unprecedented, rapid and profound changes. Some of these movements sought to achieve the necessary changes with the help of individual self-reform. Life reform in the narrower sense refers to this type of reform movement. New historical pedagogical research shows that in the major school concepts of reform pedagogy a relatively close connection with life reform is discernible. Reform pedagogy is linked to life reform-and vice versa. Numerous sociotopes of life reform had their own schools, because how better to contribute than through education to the ideal reproduction and continuity of one's own group. Our work ties in with this pedagogical research direction. The background to the first part of the study is a long-term project aimed at promoting contacts in life reform and reform pedagogy in the Austro-Hungarian monarchy and later in Hungary. In the second part we analyse the process up to 1945, in which the ideas of life reform and the elements of reform pedagogy were institutionalised and integrated into the official pedagogical guidelines of the Hungarian universities.

ERRATA: In notes 26 and 27 I follow Janusz Michałowski 's opinion that Norblin received 400 livres as a compensation for the trip to Rome which did not take place. However, it seems that this sum of money was rather compensation for Ecole's regular scholarship. //////////////////////////////////////////

The subject of the article is the youth of the painter, draftsman and illustrator Jean-Pierre Norblin de la Gourdaine (1745–1830), and the circumstances that led him to enter the service of Princess Izabela Czartoryska and her husband Adam Czartoryski. Starting from a thorough examination of Norblin’s earnings in Poland, I analyze the non-economic factors that have caused his move there. The hypothesis presented in the text assumes that one of them was the artist’s difficult professional and social situation. In the first years of his stay in Paris, Norblin used to be associated with a circle of painters of low social renown. For almost a decade he was employed by Francesco Casanova, a painter who has been a controversial figure for both the Royal Academy and critics. He also failed to gain an influential patron or loyal clientele in the Academy circles. It seems that he had no prospects for not only making a career in Paris, but also for becoming independent of Casanova. Perhaps it was this social and professional stalemate that prompted him to undertake the “recruitment journey” via London and Spa, which eventually led him to Puławy and Warsaw.

Viktor Madarász (1830–1917) is considered as one of the defining exponents of “Hungarian national art”. Yet, paradoxically, the anointed painter of the so-called Hungarian national romanticism had to go abroad to paint the pictures that would promote the national consciousness in an oppressed country and champion the ideals of Hungarian independence. Madarász lived in the French capital for almost a decade and a half, studying under the academic master Léon Cogniet, exhibiting in the Salon de Paris and becoming acquainted with illustrious members of the Parisian art society. The work that Madarász carried out in France prompts us to investigate the circumstances that influenced his career there. This study aims to take a look at the most productive period in Madarász’s career – his Parisian period – in the light of the latest research and with particular emphasis on the works he exhibited at the Salon de Paris. In conveying new information and discussing the social and cultural circumstances of Viktor Madarász’s sojourn in Paris, as well as the connections he
built up there – with educational establishments, exhibiting institutions, patrons, mediators and other artists –, this paper is intended to provide new insight into the strategies the artist pursued in order to build his career, and thereby to present
his Parisian period in a new light.

Born in Pisa, the painter Giovanni di Pietro is known only for his activity in Genoa between the Tre- and Quattrocento. This article reconsiders the totality of his oeuvre and all the documentary and epigraphic
sources concerning his activity. It proposes new hypotheses about the original provenance, history, and iconography of paintings already known or presented here for the first time and it pays more precise attention to historic context, namely to his relations with local and foreign painters and the contemporary Genoese and Italian background.

Between 1675 and 1690, a decisive span of years in Carlo Fontana’s career, the Roman publisher Giovanni Giacomo De Rossi produced some books of prints illustrating the major buildings of modern Rome: palace facades (“Nuovi Disegni delle architetture e piante dei Palazzi di Roma”, circa 1675), church facades (“Insignium Romae Templorum Prospectus”, 1683 and then 1684 in a new expanded edition), and finally church interiors (“Disegni di vari Altari e Cappelle”, 1688 or 1689). The paper focuses on the relation between De Rossi’s publications and the self-promotion strategy adopted by Fontana to attain professional success.  Initially, he ensured that two of his works were included among the buildings presented in “Nuovi disegni” (Palazzo Bigazzini) and “Prospectus” (San Marcello al Corso), even before they were completed. Later, he achieved to be present in “Disegni” with more plates than any other living architect, and one can even suppose that he actually played a role in planning that publication and selecting the works to be shown there. Furthermore, around 1690 German editions of both “Prospectus” and “Disegni” were published in Nuremberg by Johann Jakob von Sandrart and they spread rapidly throughout the Empire and the kingdom of Prussia, and even more widely in Europe.

Valentina Sapienza, "L’Arte dei pittori a venezia tra Quattro e Cinquecento: una comunità? Alla ricerca di un’identità tra pratiche di mestiere e apprendistato"
la Fraglia dei pittori di venezia può considerarsi una comunità nei termini in cui il concetto è stato teorizzato dalla nascente sociologia alla fine dell’ottocento? la corporazione esisteva già nella seconda metà del Xiii secolo e si dota dei primi statuti nel 1271. esaminando attentamente il capitolare antico sembra chiaro che questa «comunità» nasce con l’intento primo di raggruppare artigiani che lavorano prevalentemente il cuoio e il legno e che presentano come tratto comune l’uso del colore e del pennello. nella Mariegola del 1436, la pittura si fa strada piano insieme a molte altre specializzazioni. la diversificazione di competenze dei gruppi artistici e artigianali della Fraglia e l’esigenza di rappresentare gli interessi del propria professione fa emergere inevitabilmente contrasti sempre più importanti che sfoceranno nella separazione dei pittori dagli altri corpi di mestiere e nella creazione del celebre collegio (1682). che la pittura abbia sempre avuto un’identità à sé stante rispetto ad altre professioni della Fraglia sembra confermato anche dalle recenti indagini sull’appredistato: i garzoni pittori sono di norma veneziani e, a dispetto di quelli di altri mestieri del sodalizio, non percepiscono alcun salario. la pittura viene così a qualificarsi come una sorta di aristocrazia della Fraglia, in cui il garzone non rappresenta un buon investimento per il maestro – non deve considerarsi cioè forza-lavoro a basso costo – e l’apprendistato ha una natura autenticamente formativa. 

"The Guild of Painters in venice between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries: a community? In search of an identity between craft practices and apprenticeship"
May the Fraglia of painters in Venice be considered a community in the terms in which the concept was theorised by nascent sociology at the end of the nineteenth century? The guild already existed in the second half of the thirteenth century and adopted its first statutes in 1271. it seems clear from a careful examination of the ancient chapter that this ‘community’ arose with the primary goal of bringing together craftsmen who mainly worked with leather and wood and whose common characteristic was the use of paint and brush. in the Mariegola of 1436, painting advanced slowly along with many other specialisations. The diversification of skills among the artistic and craft groups in the Fraglia and the need to represent the interests of their own profession inevitably brought about increasingly important differences, which resulted in the separation of the painters from the other craft bodies and in the creation of the famous Collegio (1682). That painting always had an identity of its own compared to the other professions of the Fraglia seems also confirmed by recent studies of the apprenticeship: the painter ‘boys’ were normally Venetian and, unlike those of other trades in the brotherhood, did not receive any salary. Painting thus began to be qualified as a kind of aristocracy of the Fraglia, in which the ‘boy’ did not represent a good investment for the master – so should not be considered cheap labour – and the apprenticeship was of a genuinely educational nature.

Time does not always flow according to a line ... nor according to a plan but, rather, according to an extraordinarily complex mixture, as though it reflected stopping points, ruptures, deep wells, chimneys of thunderous acceleration, rendings, gaps-all sown at random, at least in a visible disorder.

This article examines how contemporary artists respond to the technique of hydraulic fracturing, more commonly known as “fracking.” Drawing on examples of political protest and social activism, with special focus on the ways that artistic interventions challenge energy corporations in galleries and museums, Smith analyzes how artists fuse concerns over the environment with critical aesthetics. By doing so, they explore the problematic relationships between fracking and climate change, waste, environmental degradation, pollution, and public health. In the wake of new data, research, and dissent, it is argued that contemporary art visualizes protest and continues to play a role in picturing the potentially harmful effects of fracking. Accordingly, Smith proposes that artists formulate innovative ways to confront an authoritative fuel industry and translate key issues into new modes of understanding.

This is an accepted manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Art Journal on April 2018, available at https://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/00043249.2018.1456247

Contemporanea was an exhibition held in Rome at the end of 1973, a time of crucial change for both the city and the country. It took place inside a car park and was coordinated by Achille Bonito Oliva and a group of eleven curators. Still considered a fundamental point of reference by those who had the opportunity to visit it, the exhibition was especially pertinent to the generation of artists born in the 1950s. Through the interpretation of archival documents, this essay will reconstruct the path that led to the conception and realization of Contemporanea, beginning with a consideration of the sociocultural factors at play in Rome at the time, and how they related to the public's perceptions of the choice of a parking garage as an exhibition site.

Itinéraires de graveurs et marchands d’estampes en Europe, XVIe-XVIIIe s. Mobilité et attraction migratoire des villes. Journée d’études organisée par le laboratoire Criham, sous la coordination de Blanche Llaurens, Francesca
Mariano et Véronique Meyer. 5 avril 2018.

À partir des années 40, autour de la figure di Jacques-Philippe Le Bas commencent à circuler plusieurs graveurs anglais qui séjournent à Paris dans le but d’apprendre l’art de la gravure. La première partie de mon intervention vise à éclairer leurs premiers pas et les contacts qui ont pu tisser pendant ces années, à la fois avec des éditeurs mais aussi avec des artistes. Le dépouillement de archives nous donne la possibilité d’éclairer un panorama jusqu’à maintenant sous-estimé formé par des relations avec les majeures marchands et éditeurs de Paris. L’analyse de ce réseau social, dont Pierre-François Basan, Jean-Baptiste Crépy et John Boydell sont à compter parmi les acteurs principaux, nous portera à interroger sur les causes de la croissance de la diffusion des gravures anglaises dans la Paris des Lumières et sur l’impact que ce phénomène a pu avoir sur la production artistique française de la fin du XVIIIème siècle.

Abstract
Located in the city of Salgueiro, Pernambuco, Conceição das Crioulas is a quilombola community with an oral history that refers to the arrival of six freed women to the region where they established the foundation of the community. The women directed the community life since its founding, passing through the resistance of the land expropriation and
the transmission of their culture. They invest in the education as a tool of resistence and conquest. It is from this proposal, that the relational or contexted art practiced by the Intercultural Movement IDENTITIES, where the artist is the participant of the imeddiate history, finds its space in the
community action. The text has as goal to analyze this process of artistic (inter) action of the movement in the universe of the crioulas of Conceição.