The Art Bulletin

Moving beyond conventional approaches to Psalter illustration, the creators of this late-thirteenth-century French luxury prayer book strove for visual complexity as a means to an end. Closely studied, the cycle of illuminations that accompany the Psalter, depicting the Public Life of Christ, reveals a model for devotion in which the effort required to correlate texts and images both present and implied serves as the vehicle for spiritual elevation. Indicative of the inventive and often idiosyncratic visualities of late-medieval female devotion, the manuscript reminds modern viewers to look past the surface appearance of simplicity and legibility.

The Kuszu, "painting of the nine stages of a decaying corpse," portrays the sequential decay of a female cadaver in graphic detail. The shocking subject, rooted in Buddhist devotional practices, was regularly painted and reinterpreted during half a millennium of Japanese art. The images of a decaying corpse were charged with contextualized functionalities that have gone unrecognized in current scholarship. Through an examination of four major exemplars of the genre, this study shows how new meanings of the image were catalyzed by religious and social transformations.

The English East India Company arrived in Japan in 1613. On return, its first ship’s commander, John Saris, reported that paintings should be sent there for sale, proposing two themes: battles and "lascivious" works. The former suited Japanese proclivities, but the latter is unexpected and surely came from Saris’s experience with an erotic Venus he had taken out. The company had dispatched paintings to Japan, in a ship that went via India, depositing there several items for the Mogul court. This paper seeks to reconstruct the possible appearances of the works and to assess their meanings in the home and foreign contexts.

This essay focuses on two eighteenth-century obstetric atlases published by William Smellie and William Hunter. Combining images of anatomical dissection and midwifery, these atlases medicalized childbirth in unprecedented ways. In The Birth of the Clinic, Foucault argued that the clinical method was founded on a descriptive technique that, when combined with pathological anatomy, became essentially a medical aesthetic. A similar aesthetic animates Hunter’s and Smellie’s atlases, transforming the epistemological link between the female body and pregnancy. Picturing childbirth as an illness rather than a domestic process, the engravings favor a pathological over a normative viewpoint.

William Morris was engaged in most major political causes of his day, yet his writing and designs are marked by archaism. Influenced by Morgan and Engels, Morris believed that history progressed in an upward spiral, with a "backward as well as forward movement." Thus, the Peasants' Revolt of 1381, the subject of Morris’s novel A Dream of John Ball and Burne-Jones’s etching, left a profound imprint on the consciousness of later revolutionaries. The medieval ideal of primitive communism, expressed in the stories and images surrounding the preacher Ball, survived to inspire Morris and the men and women of his day.

Paul Cézanne’s Apotheosis of Delacroix (1890-94) haunted him all his life and in the end remained unfinished. This essay considers Cézanne’s painting--an allegory featuring real and apparitional figures set in a Provençal landscape--in light of intersecting cultural discourses encompassing varieties of related concerns, ideological and aesthetic, especially the metaphoric significance of Eugène Delacroix’s use of color as symbol of political unity and as index of perceptual and cultural shifts under the Third Republic. Although Cézanne’s small painting largely reflects this context, intriguing representational incongruities militate against its emphatically declared purpose as a homage.

The Steinhof Psychiatric Hospital, outside Vienna, opened in 1907. Its layout, and its church, were designed by the leader of the modern tendency in Viennese architecture, Otto Wagner. This article analyzes the psychiatric goals of the hospital on the one hand and Wagner’s architecture on the other as overlapping but distinct languages. I argue that Wagner picked up on aspects of the utopian psychiatric rhetoric surrounding the institution, while ignoring more subtle and ambiguous tendencies toward integration with the wider world. The result was a mental hospital in the image of a model village.