The Art Bulletin

The Bocca della Veritá (Mouth of Truth) has earned popular fame as an enchanted lie detector. The ancient effigy actually represents the god Oceanus: primordial water, end of the earth and threshold of the heavens, springboard from history to eternity. As such, the figure recurrently surfaces in Roman iconography, mythography, rhetoric, political history, numismatics, hymnody, and material symbolism. In the context of the Forum Boarium, the Bocca was integral to the myth of the Romanized Hercules; evidence suggests its creation in Hadrian’s reign as part of a universal symbolism that characterized the emperor as cosmocrat and alter Hercules.

In 1987 archaeologists discovered a crypt beneath the Famensi (Dharma Gate Monastery) in Shaanxi Province, China, containing four “finger-bone” relics of the Buddha along with a trove of invaluable medieval religious artifacts. Some of the finds are associated with “Esoterism,” an important but poorly understood Buddhist ritual tradition that flourished briefly during the Tang dynasty (618–907 CE). A new reading of the Famensi relics and their nested reliquaries in light of their relation to Esoteric Buddhism suggests that the finger-bone relics themselves could be considered “art.”

The Skeletons’ Illusory Performance by Li Song unveils middle imperial Chinese attitudes toward death and society. By refashioning the social persona of the peddler within his oeuvre, Li created a complex performer in this painting. The peddler as a skeletal puppeteer manipulates a marionette that entices a toddler whose vision is dominated by the spectacle, while the onlookers are oblivious to this uncanny performance. The puppeteer’s all-seeing vision through deathless skeletal sockets contrasts sharply with that of the child and the onlookers and presents a visual commentary on contemporary sensibilities toward the relations between performance, the everyday world, and death.

In Czech Cubism, exemplified by Bohumil Kubišta, Brücke artist Ernst Ludwig Kirchner found tools for delving into the spirit to convey the inner character of modern life. Through his selective adaptation of Cubist form and his awareness of Kubišta’s ideas on modern morality governed by social relationships, Kirchner refined a personal style that reached its apogee in his Berlin street scenes. These artists’ writings and visual works offer a case study of avant-garde artistic exchange that deepens our understanding of style as an issue central to the international dialogue in the visual arts of early-twentieth-century Central Europe.