Newsletter
Association for Textual Scholarship in Art History
Vol. IX, No. 1, Fall 2001/Winter 2002
ISSN 1089-1293

Dear Colleague,

Your splendid efforts provided another successful year for the association. We extend our special gratitude to Kathy Russo of Florida Atlantic University for organizing a stimulating session at SECAC on "Emile Zola and Late Nineteenth Century French Art," and the presenters Jill Miller, Atlantic State University, Elizabeth K. Menon, Purdue University and Anita Kirchen, Florida Atlantic University, for their provocative and informative contributions.

We hope you will continue to participate in the activities of ATSAH and consider submitting abstracts to the "Call For Papers" listed in this Newsletter. We also hope that you will consider providing us with session proposals for the annual meetings of our affiliated societies: SECAC 2003, Kalamazoo 2003, RSA 2003 and CAA 2004, as well as presenting your new research at these specialized conferences.

The ATSAH website is linked with that of CAA. If you have identified websites concerned with art historical texts and images you believe would be of interest to ATSAH members, kindly provide us with the URL.


With warmest regards,

Dr. Liana De Girolami Cheney
Professor of Art History,
Coordinator of Art History, Interdisciplinary and Intercollegiate Studies, UMASS Lowell
President of ATSAH

CALL FOR PAPERS

SECAC/SESAH ANNUAL MEETING
23-26 OCTOBER 2002, MOBILE, ALABAMA

Art, the Artist, and the Wages of Time
Sponsored by ATSAH

This session is devoted to exploring the diverse ways artists and architects through the centuries have responded in image and word to the arts of their immediate and distant past. What attracted or repelled artists when writing about the artistic achievements of years gone by? What fascinated or challenged them about destroyed objects known only through verbal description? What did the artist from Giotto to Picasso expect to gain when discussing the good old/bad old days? What authority did the past carry for the artist? What were some of the critical and receptive responses to change, loss, and restoration? What did the artist dread? There are many answers to these questions and more questions to ask. 

All members of ATSAH, as well as SECAC and SESAH, are invited to submit proposals for this session to Jane Aiken, Professor Emerita, Department of Art and Art History, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA 24060 or jaiken@vt.edu. Deadline for Submission is April 15, 2002.

2003 College Art Association Annual Conference, New York City

Vitruvius Redivivus--Mind over Matter?
Sponsored by ATSAH

The Roman engineer and theorist, Marcus Pollio Vitruvius (1st century BCE) generated a conceptual matrix based on both practice and theory which in many ways determined the interpretation and the history of architecture from the Middle Ages onward in the West. This session seeks to explore anew how Vitruvius critically linked ideas about building and structure with the human body, climate, geography, nationality, and politics through the patterns of language and thought in critical literature on architecture. So, for instance, the troglodytes from the north who burrowed into caves described by Vitruvius, were credited by seventeenth-century French Academic writers as originating heavy, dark, squat, barrel-vaulted Romanesque churches. These ancient associations became woven throughout the fabric of medieval and later commentaries, emerging in high relief in French Academic commentary and the well-known dicta of Johann J. Winckelmann. These links continue to reverberate in writing about architecture and to inform-often unwittingly-our ideas regarding medieval, Renaissance, and early modern buildings. Papers that expose and investigate these Vitruvian paradigms in critical literature from the Middle Ages to the present are invited.

Submit proposals for this session to: 
Professor Tina Waldeier Bizzaro
Arts Division, Rosemont College
Rosemont, PA 10972.
Phone 610-527-0200 ext 2319.

ANNOUNCEMENT OF GENERAL INTEREST TO MEMBERS OF ATSAH from Carole Gras Bennett, Program Director, Association for Art History:

A new, revised edition of the AAH newsletter is in active preparation. For our upcoming newsletter we would like:

(1) articles or manuscripts of fairly wide interest which can appear in our newsletter
(2) your current institutional affiliation
(3) your field of interest
(4) progress in recent or long term research
(5) news of awards, sabbaticals, career changes
(6) research problems you would like to share
(7) consultancies 
(8) preferred e-mail
(9) other news of interest

RE: The Association for Art History Journal

We are actively working to organize an AAH Journal. We look forward to publishing the investigations of curators, collectors, academics, and independent scholars and critics, as well as the more technically oriented, always understanding that acceptable submissions are centrally concerned with one or more works of art and/or architecture. The journal seeks articles that are short, longer, and longest, to a maximum of some 40,000 words. Articles may be varied in topics, from throughout the entire history of the world’s art and architecture.

Tel: 812/855-5193
Fax: 812/855-9556
email: aah@indiana.edu
www.indiana.edu/~aah

BOOK REVIEW

Karl Enenkel, Jan. L. de Jong, Jeanine De Landtsheer, eds. Recreating Ancient History. Episodes from the Greek and Roman Past in the Arts and Literatures of the Early Modern Period. Intersections. Yearbook for Early Modern Studies 1 (2001). Leiden, Boston, Cologne. Brill, 2001. xiii, 375 pp., 68 b/w illustrations. ISBN 90-04-12051-3. EUR 68.07/US $80.

The three editors of this volume have brought together seventeen instructive and stimulating essays written by scholars from many different countries and disciplines. The authors probe why, how, and with what diversity historians, writers, and visual artists of the 15th through the 18th centuries recreated the Greek and Roman past in their search for meaning, that most human of pursuits. The essays in this volume focus on commentaries, literature, and images shaped by a highly selective reading of ancient sources. The principal intent of the early modern writings and representations examined here was to construct universal truths or to offer dramatically memorable examples of moral probity for the edification of a contemporary audience, especially with respect to legitimizing the political and religious status quo of early modern Europe. 

Of pivotal significance for exploring the various uses of ancient sources are four essays assessing the contributions of Justus Lipsius, a consummate antiquarian and late 16th-century humanist from the Netherlands. Marc Laureys adroitly interprets Lipsius's Admiranda sive de Romana, an essay shown by Laureys to illustrate the greatness of the Roman Empire as an exemplar for the Hapsburg Empire. Mark Morford further explores how the Neostoicism of Lipsius influenced a younger contemporary, Otho Vaenius, to espouse a model for the difficult political life of the Spanish Netherlands based on a minor Roman revolt. Both close attention to ancient sources and independence from them is also seen in Karl Enenkel's convincing study of Lipsius's dialogue on gladiatorial games, Saturnales sermones where the games were judged to have fostered virtue and bravery in facing death…a slant not unknown to those who have attended the movies recently. Finally, Jeanine De Landtsheer presents a meticulous review of Lipsius's De militia, a study of the Roman army based on a reorganization and clarification of Book VI of Polybius's Histories. Quite beyond the antiquarian interest of this work, Landtsheer exposes yet another way in which the past is made to impact the present since Lipsius's tract was adopted to train contemporary soldiers "in the Roman way" in an attempt to reform the military practice of the House of Orange.

As might be expected, this collection also includes several essays on Plutarch's influence on the early modern period. Olga van Marion plumbs the dependence on Plutarch for narrative content of Jan Baptista Wellekens (d. 1726), a Dutch painter turned defender of heroic epistles in verse. Wellekens, as others considered in this volume, remained independent of his sources when characterizing the moral rectitude of the ancient personae. Sjaak Onderdelinden connects Friedrich Schiller's purposefully inaccurate reading of Plutarch as moral and political guide to the German's need for espousing a constitutionally empowered senate body in order to balance the coercive forces of tyranny and anarchy. Paul J. Smith expands the discussion of Montaigne's well-known dependence on Plutarch's Moralia and Parallel Lives of the Greeks and Romans for quotations and anecdotes by exploring how the ancient writer provided the Frenchman with a standard of associative argumentation and digression. Montaigne also celebrated Plutarch as an exemplar of history writing because he was seen to "linger more over motives than events." In his thoughtful discussion of Coriolanus Bart Westerweel investigates how Shakespeare excavated different translations of Plutarch's Lives with the obvious intent of producing a dramatic impact and also of exploring new aspects of human nature, valor and honor. The playwright's view of history, Smith argues, was formed by Philip Sidney's Defence of Poetry. On the assumption that Shakespeare actually had a view of history other than "appealing to the gates of popular judgment" and filling the Globe with paying customers, Sidney's celebration of the creative imagination and the vatic function of the poet was not without pertinent distinctions downplayed by Smith. For Sidney the laws of history required that the story of what men had actually done be followed scrupulously. Also, Sidney was a resolute supporter of the unity of time and place in drama, neither of which interested Shakespeare in the least.

Wilfried Stroh delves with insightful vigor into Shakespeare's dependence on ancient rhetorical devices and the writings of Cicero in Julius Caesar. The interaction between ancient histories concerning Caesar and early modern dramatists is also stressed in the essays of Jan Bloemendal and Alicia Montoya. Both write about the steadily increasing importance, notably marked by Shakespeare's history plays, of moral issues deeply embedded in human passions. Bloemendal discusses the mid-16th-century play about Caesar in Latin by the French humanist Marc-Antoine Muret. Muret, the premier Latinist of his day and the first to show the murder of Caesar on stage, overthrew a classical reticence about obscene acts by emphasizing the grim particulars of human tragedy on stage. Nonetheless, his play was concerned with reviving the past by presenting Caesar's persona as a Stoic ideal applicable to the contemporary political scene. Of equal contemporary pertinence, is Montoya's consideration of the plight of 17th-century female writers, whose dependence on classical erudition marked them as unfeminine and a target for ridicule. Montoya in particular considers how this prejudice against femmes savantes plays out in the writing of La Mort de César by Marie-Anne Barbier. While Barbier attempted to establish an authoritative authorial voice with her reliance on ancient sources, her plot was impelled towards its grisly conclusion by focusing on the actions of the women surrounding Caesar. For the female author, ancient histories became mere rhetorical tools for attracting a particular audience long cultivated by humanists while rebellious women unheralded in ancient sources acted as the principal motivational forces of the drama. Bettina Noak's essay is about the play L. Catalina by the prolific 17th-century Dutch writer Lambert von den Bosch who put forward Cataline as a negative model fomenting civil war and Cicero as the positive exemplar raging against a greedy aristocracy wedded to "pomp and frivolity" rather than "virtue and piousness." The much burnished Roman past, as Noak argues, is then seen to share the pro-Orange faction's position favoring a mixed form of government.

Images also persuaded audiences of the truth of efficacious myths taken from a distant past. The visual representation of the daring deeds of ancient worthies gained particular popularity early in Renaissance art. Anton Boschloo reveals how the art theory of this period directed artists and their patrons to admire what became the most important type of painting, the historia. As explained in the early 15th century by Leon Battista Alberti, the principal function of the historia was not to report facts accurately but to touch the soul of the observer. The painter was urged to filter historical events through his imagination to attain timeless truths, despite the existence, as Boschloo argues, of a strident minority voice urging antiquarian and historical accuracy and signaling shifting attitudes centered often in the art academies. Buschloo adds an adroit evaluation of some fascinating competitive drawings executed in the 1670s and 1680s at the Accademia di San Luca which poise standard artistic practices against artistic license.

The very fact that a painter was viewed as someone capable of grasping important poetic and philosophic considerations signals the well known elevation of the status of the artist during the early modern period. Francesca Terrenato's essay on Karl van Mander's Book of Painting discusses one ploy for illuminating this elevation, that of embellishing older biographical traditions. Terrenato inquires into how van Mander came to make the Emperor Hadrian not only interested in art but also a practicing sculptor and painter and thus an exemplar for both artist and ruler. Maria Berbara maintains in her essay on civic self-sacrificing that the visual arts, prior to literature and historical commentary, overcame a stricture in Christian polemic dating back at least to Augustine limiting true virtue to the acts of Christians. By the 15th century, for instance, the pagan Marcus Curtius, who according to legend sacrificed himself for the good of Rome, was depicted bearing the familiar attributes and gestures of a Christian martyr. Most educated Italians, however, would not have forgotten that honorable non-Christian men and women from the ancient and medieval past lived in a light that overcame the darkness of hell in Dante's Inferno, Book IV and that their fame "gains favor in heaven."

The intricate play of word and image in the service of political realities is studied with great care in Arnoud Visser's essay on the emblems of Joannes Sambucus. The influence of contemporary pressures on images is also revealed in the neatly constructed argument of Jan L. de Jong. De Jong investigates the impact of Clement VII's decision to change the content of frescoes painted in the 1520s by Raphael and his students in the papal audience chamber known as the Sala di Constantino. This change is shown to be directed against Protestant doubts about the legitimacy of the papacy and against earlier humanist scholarship proving the illegitimacy of the so-called Donation of Constantine, a document supposedly confirming the supremacy of the papacy over earthly governments. The artists adopted a type of painting recognized by contemporary theorists as a pittura mista. For the contemporary audience the balancing of fact and imaginative recreation was convincing, useful, and acceptable to the audience it served.

The collection reviewed here might have been strengthened if some authors had not scrupulously avoided considering the effects of changing values in historical criticism, particularly as discussed in the 14th and 15th centuries. And a more penetrating consideration of the target audience of the early modern works under review would have added distinction and value to some of the papers. Nonetheless, the essays inform the reader in a variety of engaging ways about how the ancient past shines into the present when seen through the prism of an ever changing historical lens. Scholars concerned with early modern art, culture, and literature, as well as with politics and historiography, will find the volume informative and absorbing. This is a very interesting book.

Jane Andrews Aiken
Virginia Tech

With gratitude to Professors Brian Britt, David Burr, Sue Farquhar, Ann-Marie Knoblauch, and Amy Nelson, members of the Virginia Tech Interdisciplinary Research Group, for graciously sharing their expertise and comments.

Members Publications
(NB: works in progress have not been included)

Cheney, Liana De Girolami, Alicia Faxon, and Kathleen Russo. Self-Portraits by Women Painters, Ashgate, 2000.

Freedman, Luba. "Titian's Ruggiero and Angelica: a tribute to Ludovico Ariosto," Renaissance Studies 15.3 (2001), 287-300.

Luba Freedman and Gerlinde Huber-Rebenich, eds., Diverse Approaches to the Representation of Classical Mythology in Art, Wege zum Mythos. Ikonographische Repertorien zur Rezaption des antiken Mythos in Europa, Beiheft III, Gebr. Mann Verlag, 2001.

McHam, Sarah Blake. Looking at Italian Renaissance Sculpture, editor, Cambridge University Press, paperback edition, 2000.

____________. "The Exterior Sculptural Decoration of S. Maria dei Miracoli. In The Church of S. Maria dei Miracoli in Venice Post-Restoration. Mario Piana, ed., Istituto Venetio di Scienze, Lettere, ed Arti, 2001.
___________. "The Role of Pliny's Natural History in the Sixteenth-Century Redecoration of the Piazza of San Marco, Venice." In Luba Freedman and Gerlinde Huber-Rebenich, eds., Diverse Approaches to the Representation of Classical Mythology in Art, 89-105.
____________. "Donatello's Bronze David and Judith as Metaphors of Medici Rule in Florence," The Art Bulletin LXXXIII.1 (2001), 32-47.
Paoletti, John. "The Rondanini Pieta: Ambiguity Maintained Through the Palimpsest," Artibus et Historiae, 42, 2000, 53-80.
__________. "Cosimo de' Medici, Patronage, and the Church of San Tommaso in the Mercato Vecchio," Pantheon 58, 2000, 54-72.
Siegel, Nancy, Mary Hague. Municipal Parks in New York City: Olmsted, Riis, and the Transformation of the Urban Landscape, 1858-1897. Rowman & Littlefield, 2001.
___________. The Morans: The Artistry of a Nineteenth-Century Family of Painter-Etchers. Juniata College Press, 2001.
___________. "Painted Image, Inspirational Text: Thomas Cole and the Influence of John Bunyan." In Mark Andrews White, ed., Image and Text: American Creativity and the Relationship between Writing and the Visual Arts. The Edwin A. Ulrich Museum of Art, 2000.

Deborah Stott, "'Sono quel Cornelia che sempre son stata': l'epistolario fra Cornelia Collonello e Michelangelo," Atti del Convegno Internazional: I Della Rovere nell'Italia delle Corte, Urbino, 16-19 September, 1999.

Tuck-Sala, Anna, Ann P. Plamondon, Linnea Vacca. Sorrento, Visiting Paradise, Francis Di Mauro, 2000.

Reminders

If you would like to prepare a book review, review article, or bibliography, provide a description of a conference, or announce a publication or event of interest to ATSAH members, please contact Jane Aiken, Dept. of Art & Art History, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA 24061-0103 or by e-mail at jaiken@vt.edu.

Note that the dues for all members are $20 annually. Please send your dues to Liana Cheney at the address below.

Deadline for submission of material for spring/summer newsletter is 1 May.

Join ATSAH

The purpose of ATSAH is to promote the study and publication of art-historical primary sources, and to facilitate communication among scholars working with art literature. Here are some of the things we do:

• Publish a newsletter twice a year to disseminate information about ongoing scholarship, publications, conferences, and computer programs for textual analysis.
• Arrange discounts on reprints and facsimile editions for members.
• Publish summaries and reviews of important publications and exhibitions.

Eventually we hope to:

• Encourage the establishment of standards for editing and annotating art-historical primary sources.
• Organize occasional conferences on art literature.

Please encourage friends and colleagues to join ATSAH by sending them the enclosed membership information and application.

For more information, contact Liana De Girolami Cheney, 112 Charles Street, Beacon Hill, Boston, MA 02114, lianacheney@earthlink.net, fax: 617-557-2962, phone: 617-367-1679

ATSAH

ASSOCIATION for TEXTUAL SCHOLARSHIP in ART HISTORY

Membership Information

Membership Dues: $20
Dues are for calendar year 2002
Make check or international postal money order payable to ATSAH. EIN# 31-1351890

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ATSAH
c/o Dr. Liana de Girolami Cheney
112 Charles Street
Boston, MA 02114


Information for membership directory (Please print)

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ATSAH Newsletter
Jane A. Aiken 
Department of Art & Art History
Virginia Tech
Blacksburg, VA 24061-0103

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