The Art Bulletin

At the central Indian site of Chandrehe stands a rare example of a monumental stone monastery, built in 973 by a sect of Shiva-worshiping ascetics known as the Mattamayuras. Its complex architectural program suggests that it was carefully designed to evoke the soteriological and ritual world of medieval Hindu monasteries, about which very little other evidence exists. Reinforcing the authority of the monastic community’s leader, the guru, and constructing him as a divinized being for popular devotion, the building points to the importance of royally sponsored ascetics at pilgrimage sites located at the peripheries of dynastic states.

Greco-Roman themes are a defining feature of middle Byzantine secular art, but scholars note frequent slippage between medieval representations and their classical models. A well-known glass vessel further complicates Byzantium’s relation to ancient precedents by combining classicizing iconography with pseudo-Arabic inscriptions. Reconsideration of middle Byzantine attitudes toward Greco-Roman and Islamic traditions suggests magic, specifically divination, as a point of intersection among these cultural groups, with the vessel drawing from distinct iconographic and inscriptional sources to enhance its divinatory function. The object’s aesthetic eclecticism is best understood as a meaningful mingling and creative reinterpretation of its models.

Traditionally discussed in terms of their unusual iconography and forward-looking style, the thirteenth-century reliefs at S. Marco in Venice depicting artisans and shopkeepers carry a fraught social meaning when considered in light of contemporary Venetian labor legislation. They were sculpted at a moment when Venetian patricians acted to limit sharply the working class’s role in the government. As products of the patronage of the city’s nobles, these images, which at first glance appear to valorize and dignify the artisan class, on closer examination reveal fissures expressing the patrons’ increasing fear of the collective strength of the Venetian popolo.

Lack of written documentation on female patrons in fifteenth-century Florence has long obstructed scholars’ understanding of women’s influence on visual culture during this art historically crucial period. The problem is best addressed by turning to the objects themselves. The attribution, on stylistic grounds, of the illuminated frontispiece of an unstudied manuscript from Florence’s Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale underpins a larger argument that Lucrezia Tornabuoni de’ Medici engaged in a collaborative commission with one of the most innovative and sought-after illuminators of the time, Francesco d’Antonio del Chierico, and the date of this codex suggests her surprisingly extensive influence on the visual arts.

On January 6, 1940, the popular radio program Art for Your Sake aired an elaborate dramatization of Thomas Hart Benton’s art and life over stations on the NBC network. Considered alongside NBC documents and selected paintings by the artist, the dramatization—in which the artist likely participated—presents in a new, critical light questions posed by Regionalism, pointing as well to that artistic movement’s often overlooked mission of the mass distribution of cultural products. For radio and Regionalism alike, constructing a national identity was only one part of the agenda; reaching that nation was equally important.