The Art Bulletin

An "international style" of shared motifs characterizes the luxury arts of the fourteenth and thirteenth centuries b.c.e. in the eastern Mediterranean. Scholarly pursuit of motif origination and transfer has obscured nuances of form and meaning in the ill-defined stylistic category. Shifting away from questions of artists and production, this study of prestige goods from the Syrian kingdom of Ugarit focuses on internal formal differences and variations of signification, fragmenting the classificatory boundaries of the "international style" and situating these objects within a dynamic multidimensional system of local and international status formation, promotion, and negotiation.

The celebrated ninth-century Nyoirin Kannon statue of Kanshinji is regarded by scholars as the temple’s original honzon (main icon) and a paradigm of Esoteric Buddhist expression. This essay highlights the canonizing strategies of modern scholarship and suggests another honzon for Kashinji’s early history. A study of records and contexts points to the importance of both extant and lost ninth-century statues at the temple. At the same time, historiographic investigation highlights the adverse relationship between scholarly research on Kanshinji and modern apologists' presentation of Esoteric Buddhism and its icons as enigmatic and sensual, and other misrepresentations of their function.

Passeri’s report in his seventeenth-century biography of Duquesnoy that the sculptor and his friend Nicolas Poussin sought to create art in the Greek manner has long intrigued scholars. This article calls attention to period testimony that corroborates Passeri’s account and records an academy formed by Duquesnoy’s circle. The significance of the Greek manner is explored in relation to Duquesnoy’s Saint Susanna and its seventeenth-century critical reception, and the circumstances of the commission are clarified. The statue’s subsequent reception is then related to the issues of taste and the perception of the antique that underlay the sculpture’s genesis.

One of the most macabre and original paintings of the nineteenth century, William Holman Hunt’s The Scapegoat is here examined for the first time in depth in relation to Anglo-Judaic culture. The subject, drawn from biblical and Talmudic sources, was intended as a symbolic bridge between the Jewish sacrificial goat driven into the wilderness on the Day of Atonement and the sacrificial example of Jesus Christ. By invoking Judaism as a religion frozen in a time warp, Hunt’s powerful image further operated as one more prop of the West’s stereotypical narration of the East and imperialist worldview.

This paper argues that Alma-Tadema’s representations of the ancient city of Rome can be seen as significant explorations of urban experience, parallel to the more familiar nineteenth-century representations of modern Paris. Alma-Tadema distinguishes clearly between the small-town environment of Pompeian subjects and the metropolitan environment of pictures set in the capital. Using techniques such as oblique viewpoints and edge cropping, Alma-Tadema presents the "shock" experience characteristic of the modern city in urban theory. The late nineteenth-century notion of the city’s modernity thus provides a novel perspective on traditional fascination with Rome as the ultimate paradigm for the urban.

During World War II a debate broke out in the United States over what form postwar memorials should take. One group advocated traditional memorials, such as statues, obelisks, and triumphal arches, and the other supported what were called "living memorials," useful projects such as civic improvements. This essay explores the meaning of this debate in a broad cultural context, interpreting a number of key proposals and texts in order to argue that living memorials profoundly complicated American expectations of memorialization and practices of commemoration, a confusion evident in the recent controversy over the National Memorial to World War II in Washington, D.C.