The Art Bulletin

After investing significant parts of three decades in his Triumph of Religion, John Singer Sargent never painted the final image, the panel he called the keynote of the mural program. This article reconstructs the artist’s declared intentions for his decoration, clarifies the project’s narrative design, anchors the reception of the work in relation to contemporary politics of religion and race, and accounts for the unfinished state of the murals at the time of Sargent’s death. Incompletion dramatically altered possible readings of Triumph, redirecting its narrative energies and generating new meanings that stood in marked contrast to the idea Sargent proposed.

Joining in the widespread renewal of interest in the Civil War at the turn of the century, a number of trompe l'oeil paintings from the 1880s and 1890s depict aging war memorabilia on their deceptive surfaces. The circulation and display of these paintings drew together a fraternity of Northern Republican businessmen who had themselves served in the war. The pictures, however, also appealed to a broader audience that shared with these businessmen the capacity to manage the interpretive ambiguities of the sort manifested both by the trickeries of contemporary commerce and by the misleading paintings of Civil War souvenirs.

Taking as its point of departure John Singleton Copley’s complaint that colonial Bostonians regarded painting "no more than any other usefull trade," the essay explores what being ranked as an artisan meant to artists in eighteenth-century England and America. Portraitists especially suffered this indignity, probed here through the topos of the tailor, a persistent character in artist narratives. In the effort to redefine their activity as a liberal art, an art of gentlemen, painters employed varying strategies. Copley’s politics of representation are exposed in close examination of two works from the late 1760s: his self-portrait and portrait of silversmith Paul Revere.

Newly discovered documentation provides evidence for the original design of the complementary wall memorials honoring Giovanni Battista d'Aste and his wife Clarice Margana, located on opposing walls of the choir of S. Maria in Via Lata in Rome. The new evidence proves that the compositions of both monuments--designed by Bernini and completed in 1643--were altered at some point after August 1660. This discovery invites an exploration of the activities of the Sacra Congregazione della Visita Apostolica under Pope Alexander VII (1655-67) and a reassessment of the d'Aste monuments relative to Bernini’s later tomb designs

This study redefines the Strada Nuova as an urban enclave or linear piazza, serving a select group of old noble families at the very moment when their power was being challenged by the new nobility in the Genoese republic of 1528. Reconsideration of this major Renaissance axial street within its local Genoese context highlights the many links it had to medieval family neighborhood (albergo) organization. Palace siting and facade styles related these families along the ceremonial corridor, which was used to create a new Roman classical image of the city during the second half of the sixteenth century.