The Art Bulletin

The Jinci temple complex is best known today for the Sage Mother Hall (ca. 1038–87), dedicated to the Spirit of the Jin Springs. But for the literati elite of premodern China, Jinci was dedicated to an ancestral figure, the Zhou dynasty lord Shu Yu of Tang. By integrating architectural evidence into the site’s textual history, I show both how Jinci reflects the interests of the agrarian community and how its architecture was manipulated to assert competing interpretations of the Sage Mother’s identity in order to claim dominance over the site.

The unprecedented emphasis on Judas in Pietro Lorenzetti’s Passion cycle is best explained in terms of its Franciscan audience. For followers of Saint Francis alter Christus, to whom the Apostles were exemplars, Judas functioned as a dire warning against the ever-present dangers of falling from grace. The frescoes were painted at a time when the Franciscan dispute over the interpretation of poverty was threatening to split the order. Interpreting Judas in the light of Bonaventuran doctrine, the Franciscans at Assisi were able to use the lost Apostle to transmit important messages about poverty and obedience to their brethren.

Peter Paul Rubens based his early mythological painting The Finding of Erichthonius on book 2 of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, among other classical sources. An examination of the painting’s allegorical content reveals how Rubens’s approach to the meaning of this myth is comparable to the manner in which Ovid wove different mythological episodes together into a metanarrative of transformations at the core of his poem. Specifically, by means of complex visual allusions, Rubens accomplished a similar layering of stories, which serves to relate this Attic foundation myth to a larger theme of Christianity’s succession to paganism.

The sitter in Lady with a Fan by Diego Velázquez has long defied identification, perhaps because vital clues in the portrait itself have been overlooked or misinterpreted. This essay analyzes the sitter’s costume and attributes in view of seventeenth-century notions of decorum, national identity, and fashion. The identification of the sitter with Marie de Rohan, duchess of Chevreuse—a French aristocrat known to have been painted by Velázquez in Madrid in 1638—is proposed and supported with evidence from contemporary visual sources and documents, leading to a new reading of the portrait.

Greuze’s failed attempt to be received into the Académie Royale as a history painter serves as pivot for a central transition in the eighteenth-century conception of history painting. His reception piece, Septimius Severus, mobilized a new model of psychological identification originating in the theatrical realm. The painting emulated celebrated examples of the dramatic sublime associated with Corneille, which were grafted onto an eighteenth-century perception of Poussin. This new version of the sublime of history painting is also shown to inform Fragonard’s masterpiece Coresus and Callirhoe, as well as the brilliant ekphrasis performed on this work by Denis Diderot.

Celebrated in histories of Czech modernism, the 1926 book Alphabet has received little sustained attention. Structured as a mock syllabary, Alphabet thematizes the pedagogical zeal of the historical avant-gardes and simultaneously discloses the avant-garde resistance to legibility through its emphasis on “letters as such.” Milĉa Mayerová enacted that exemplary paradox forcefully with her impersonation of letters in dance. Yet her poses failed to read as letters except when printed photographically alongside the book’s text and typography. That insufficiency is theorized here as a critique of autonomous language, the masculinist ideal that motivated Mayerová’s mentor and coauthors. Claes Oldenburg’s The Street and Urban Renewal in Greenwich Village, 1960 JOSHUA A. SHANNON 136 Claes Oldenburg’s installation The Street—exhibited twice in Greenwich Village in 1960—used banal, trashlike materials to depict pedestrians, cars, street signs, and other elements of a New York City streetscape. This essay considers the work as a means of thinking about the possibilities for and limitations on the city, in view of the giant and highly controversial program of modernist urban renewal then reshaping much of New York. The essay argues that The Street offered a negative reflection on the effort to render a newly abstracted urban environment through renewal, insisting instead on the city’s obdurate materiality.