The Art Bulletin

The frontispiece of the Old French Bible moralisée depicting God, compass in hand, creating the world, has come to represent the fruitful interaction of learned science and theology in the High Middle Ages. This assessment of the painting’s meaning derives from its treatment as a freestanding painting of a divine Architect rather than as the first image in an illuminated codex with deliberate iconographic and textual messages. This essay restores the manuscript context, reading its images and text alongside those of related thirteenth-century Bibles moralisées to locate this illumination within the iconographer’s evaluation of astronomy, logic, philosophy, and disbelief.

The final phase of construction, begun in 1296, of Notre-Dame, the cathedral of Paris, encompassed sixteen chevet chapels, the enclosing wall of the liturgical choir, and an urgent campaign of structural consolidation. This study proposes that through the integration of a visually complex architecture with imagery, the master masons Pierre de Chelles and Jehan Ravy composed an environment that must be understood in terms of contemporary optical theory and devotional practices rather than modern notions of stylistic progress. Setting Notre-Dame within the context of fourteenth-century building in Paris illuminates the process of meaningful selection that guided its design.

By resituating Johnson’s celebrated painting in its original urban context of Washington, D.C., this essay offers a new reading of its political and racial imagery. Washington was the primary battleground for abolitionists, and the unusual local conditions of slavery, as well as the specific neighborhood topography of Johnson’s family home, greatly inflected the work. A comprehensive survey of critical commentary, ca. 1859-67, reveals a general attempt to read the painting as a nostalgic view of rural plantation life. Finally, economic and moral incentives for this retreat to sentiment and nostalgia are explored.

In a series of putatively pastoral genre paintings Homer produced beginning around 1870 he represented early male adolescence as an age of transition marked by alienation and loss, with weaning, or symbolic struggle over mother’s milk, his governing metaphor. This figure of compromised access to nurture, organized around such visual and structural symbols as haystacks, ropes, and fences, while concerned most literally with the drama of male childhood becoming, served Homer additionally as vehicle for reflection both on troubled race relations, and on the collapse of pastoral itself as a viable pictorial mode, in the decade following the Civil War.

Photographs made during or shortly after events linked to the Paris Commune have long been narrowly interpreted as political documents or statements, most of them condemning the short-lived radical government. A little-known series entitled Désastres de la guerre by J. Andrieu demonstrates that these images, and responses to them, encompass a much wider variety of readings. This article examines the series' material production, titling, and allusion to Goya’s Los desastres de la guerra, subjects, dissemination, and reception, and considers its broader contexts of visual and literary responses to war and the Haussmannization of Paris.

This essay is a hermeneutic investigation into a "mirror mode of looking," which the author defines as a strategy of semiotic representation inherited by Manet from a host of predecessors, including Van Eyck, Titian, Velázquez, Steen, Vermeer, and Watteau. It is proposed that the early historical precedence of a "mirror mode" in realist painting calls for a new, multivalent reading of the praxis of mimesis (and its public reception) in the premodern era. In turn, the subjective visuality of nineteenth-century modernism signals perhaps not so radical a departure from a former "ocularcentric regime" than is commonly presumed.