The Art Bulletin

In the early years of the fifth century c.e., Lausos, an aristocrat at the court of Theodosios II (402-450), formed a collection of ancient statuary for display in the city of Constantinople. Included in the ensemble were such famous works of Greco-Roman antiquity as the Zeus by Pheidias from Olympia and the Aphrodite of Knidos by Praxiteles. This article proposes that the Lausos gathering, which always has been considered a private one, was in fact a public display designed to express Theodosian policy regarding the fate of classical statuary and, along with it, Hellenic tradition in an increasingly Christian world.

During the fifteenth century, urban policies aimed at renewing the architectural form of the Strada Romana, Siena’s main street. These policies transformed the street into a showpiece of civic values, by encouraging both state-subsidized minor improvements of private buildings and facilitating patrons of more major projects along it. Such was the success of the renewal campaign that public, institutional, and private patrons jostled for prominent sites along the Strada, developing varied and inventive solutions in order to extend the visual impact of their individual buildings' facades on the street.

Beginning in the late 1520s and continuing through the 1540s, professional jousting between Michelangelo and Titian was especially intense as both artists sought favor from the same patrons. Since the sixteenth century this competition has facilitated efforts to define their relationship in the context of the paragone: Michelangelo’s disegno versus Titian’s colorito. But in addition to noting stylistic differences, contemporary critics perceived similarities. In part, the "perfection of art" each demonstrates is an artful fusion of opposites, specifically, the union of masculinity and femininity. This study considers this aspect of Michelangelo and Titian’s work within the larger cultural milieu.

Art historians have long speculated that Manet’s unfinished painting The Burial might be linked to the 1867 funeral of Baudelaire. The article presents evidence that the vantage point Manet used was well known both as a scenic spot and as the neighborhood of the ragpickers described in Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal and shows how Manet’s representation of a funeral was inflected by Haussmann’s controversial proposal to build a new necropolis outside Paris. Finally, the friendship of Manet and Baudelaire is reexamined in the course of considering the possible forms a homage to Baudelaire might (and might not) take.

One central claim of the Dance of Death, namely, that in death all are equal, is examined here in its manifestation in the history and culture of Dresden. Emphasis is on three works: Christoph Walther I’s frieze (1535), Alfred Rethel’s print series (1849), and Richard Peter’s photobook (1949). Rethel’s and Peter’s secularization of the Dance of Death is accompanied by a shift in attention from the dead to the living, understood as survivors. This shift raises difficult questions about the Dance of Death’s central claim, its authors, and their audiences, which are explicitly addressed from a late twentieth-century perspective.

This essay argues that Ernst Kirchner’s street scenes from 1913-14 participated in a discourse about luxury and immorality, implicating art, advertising, and fashion and focusing on the display window that arose in Berlin at the time. Political conservatives attempted to pass laws they claimed would protect youth and check immorality. The debate called attention both to a new relationship between sexuality and public space that was developing in the city and to art’s transformation through new commercial practices. Issues of censorship contributed to the imaginary in Kirchner’s street scenes and the identification drawn between himself, the prostitute, and the metropolis.

Assuming that art and experience must be linked, that artistic as well as critical practices and positions, interests, and privileges are colored by personal factors that may reward examination, this essay asks what has been at stake, and for whom, in the exempting of the canonical Minimalist artists from biographical scrutiny. At issue are the consequences not only of the disuse but also of a partial or uneven use of biographical information relative to artists associated with the movement and to certain critics responsible for the imposing face, or facelessness, that Minimalism has come to assume in the public eye.

New documentary evidence presented here allows us to flesh out Piero di Cosimo’s biography. Three catasti (property tax declarations), retranscribed and including their marginal notations, helped to pinpoint his birth date to January 2, 1462, and two newly found documents of 1461 and 1473 further our knowledge of the family’s origins, whereabouts, and possessions during Piero’s childhood. Piero also appears among the membership lists of the Florence Compagnia di S. Luca at the earliest known date of 1482. Finally, two notarial references reveal the possibility of Piero’s second profession as a manuscript illuminator in the 1490s.

This article presents several new documents that shed new light on the biography of Piero di Cosimo. These sometimes confirm and sometimes cast doubt on specific details in Vasari’s Life of the artist. Even more important, they help us see Pieroówhose antisocial persona is one of the icons of art historyóin a social and public context, through the glimpses they afford of his interactions with fellow artists, relatives, neighbors, and religious confraternities. The problems raised by the new archival discoveries lead to a consideration of the differing conventions applying to legal documents and literary texts like the Lives.