The Art Bulletin

This article addresses a complex formal and iconographic composition, which, like most French Renaissance stained-glass windows, is virtually unstudied as a work of art. An unusually rich matrix of documentary sources allows us to argue against historiography and claim that such works are paintings with rich interpretive potential, marginalized only because of their medium. Indeed, the concerns and contexts revealed by their study place them at the center of postmodern art historical discourse. Since sixteenth-century windows are currently in danger of disintegration from physical neglect, their integration into the scholarly mainstream might also save them from destruction.

Donatello’s bronze David and Judith and Holofernes should be considered a de facto pair. As recently confirmed, they were the only two modern freestanding sculptures displayed in the outdoor spaces of the Medici Palace from about 1464–66 to 1495. The related discovery of an inscription praising David as a tyrant slayer accords with a similar inscription once on the Judith and Holofernes. This new evidence is combined with a demonstration of how the two sculptures evoke John of Salisbury’s writings and the Athenian statues known as the Tyrannicides to establish the Medici as defenders of Florentine liberty.

This essay considers the relation between miniature portraits and the artifacts (such as snuffboxes and jewelery) in which they were commonly incorporated in England in the eighteenth century. Taking into account issues of material culture, court ritual and protocol, and questions of the performative human body within historically specific social and political environments, I argue for a holistic approach to the phenomenon of the portrait-object as a way of opening up avenues toward a better historical understanding of portraiture’s functions and of the interactive relationship among imagery, three-dimensional objects, and the gendered body in early modern visual culture.

Overlooked in art historical scholarship and excluded from the canon of Japanese Zen Buddhist portraiture (chinso), the seventeenth-century statue venerated as the monk Shokei Jofu (d. 1536) at Korin'in contains an interior inscription that reveals that the portrait has undergone both relocation and reidentification during its history. At stake here, and explored in this essay, are not merely the portrait’s trajectory of relocation and the circumstances of its shift of identity but also the judgments of art historians and Buddhologists regarding portraiture in the Zen tradition.