The Art Bulletin

Ramayana episodes sculpted as narrative ornamentation on a ninth-century Hindu site in Central Java do not seem to follow any one version of this ancient Indian epic. Close readings of the reliefs' animal characters uncover a structural logic associated with another literary epic, which in turn reveals the political ambitions of the temple’s patron. Many indigenous metaphors and artistic conventions are also found to be integrated within this pictorial narrative. Thus, by deviating from earlier studies of these narrative panels and interpreting previously elided elements, we gain new insights into a complicated and understudied period in Javanese art history.

Openwork spires have generally been seen as typical of the German Late Gothic sphere, but they also mark the culmination of the trends toward greater height and skeletal structure already evident in French Gothic architecture of the thirteenth century. This essay argues that the completion of the first openwork spire, built in Freiburg im Breisgau between roughly 1300 and 1330, was made possible by the intersection of French architectural ideas imported through the prestigious cathedral workshops of Cologne and Strasbourg and Germanic patronage patterns in which civic pride and burgher donations played a crucial role.

The Tale of Genji Album (1510) in the Harvard University Art Museums collection is the earliest extant complete pictorialization of Japan’s most famous classical tale. This article situates the album within the artistic traditions, geopolitical changes, and complex web of human relationships that resulted in its production. Commissioned in Kyoto by a regional warlord to take back to the western provinces, the Genji Album provides numerous insights into Japan’s "culture of Genji“ and demonstrates the key role of the painter Tosa Mitsunobu in the new strategies of self-fashioning among Kyoto aristocrats of the sixteenth century.

Michelangelo’s Sogno has long been understood as an allegory of virtue and vice, a readily legible image. A gift given by the artist to an intimate friend, the Sogno is indeed legible, but its message is actually complex and elusive. The drawing is meant to be meditated upon, its rich imagery designed to elicit multiple but complementary interpretations. Employing the iconography of melancholy, references to dreams, to love, and to divine inspiration, the Sogno functions as a self-conscious reflection on artistic inspiration and creation, revealing both the benefits and the afflictions granted to the divinely inspired individual.

The painting Esther before Ahasuerus marks a definitive resolution in Nicolas Poussin’s approach to narrative. Instead of focusing on the representation of the passions, Poussin epitomizes Esther’s beauty, Ahasuerus’s majesty, and the bondage of Israel. He constructs these ideas as pictorial concetti through metaphorical allusions to ancient artworks that also appear in a contemporary text on Esther by Luigi Manzini. These same works inspired Poussin’s theoretical precepts on the concetto and ideal imitation. Esther resolves Poussin’s experiments with pictorial structure in his later narrative paintings to transmit poetic conceits directly to the beholder.

In 1942 the sculptor Isamu Noguchi was "voluntarily" interned in the Poston (Arizona) Relocation Center for Japanese Americans. Poston represented a significant experience of racialization for this Japanese American sculptor, one that seems to have pushed him to interrogate how race and identity operated within the liberal model of American art during the 1940s. Noguchi’s sculptures of this time approach the relations between race, nation, and identity critically. The particular abstract forms of Noguchi’s work suggest how modern sculpture might evade, resist, or question the racist assumptions that permeated contemporary discourse about the "nature" of American art in the 1940s.