The Art Bulletin

The Pantheon of the Kings at León is generally accepted as a monument of the 1080s with wall paintings dated about 1100, a dating that suggests that the patron was Fernando I’s daughter Urraca, and that places the execution of the Panteón in a period of political and liturgical change. This paper explores the structure and decoration of the Panteón and considers the full implications of its context. Using manuscript evidence, a detailed icono-graphic study, and comparative material, it shows that the Panteón embodied intercession for its dead and incorporated both the Leonese monarchy’s Cluniac interests and its Gothic heritage.

Around 1500 there arose in the Netherlands a highly refined variant of Late Gothic architecture that was nurtured by prominent patrons and artists through the 1530s. Designers emphasized recognizable tracery motifs that caught the eye, oriented viewers, and lent prominence to the parts of larger structures they adorned. Music and literature relied comparably on short melodic passages and verbal phrases, implying habits of perception deeply rooted in the culture. Further, distinctive tracery designs might serve as markers of identity, generic badges of individuals or institutions. Changes in social structure and conventions for representing public images were closely related to these developments.

Recent debate over the chronology of the Costabili polyptych, painted for the high altar of S. Andrea in Ferrara, has overlooked the broaderquestion of interpretation regarding its genesis following Ferrara’s participation in the Cambrai Wars. This essay analyzes how the altarpiece negotiates the concept of "just war" while communicating God’s peace and salvation. Especially relevant to interpreting the imagery are the writings of Andrea Baura and AntonioMeli, two contemporary Augustinian friars from S. Andrea, who offered new ways of reading Scripture to overcome Ferrara’s historical and spiritual conflicts.

By 1539 Giulio Clovio had produced three frontispieces for manuscript copies of a commentary written by his patron Cardinal Marino Grimani. A reading of the commentary, which belongs to a body of literaturewritten against Martin Luther in the 1530s, establishes the relationship of these miniatures to each other and the text. Within the context of a religious polemic, style becomes an important vehicle formeaning. The romanitá of the cardinal’s language and of Clovio’s miniatures both supplements the commentary’s argument, promulgating the authority of the Roman Church, and represents their desire for grazia˜religious, courtly, and artistic.

The article investigates how artists and patrons exchanged ideas about color, and how the form and content of their communication affected the coloristic appearance of commissioned works. Discussion of color in contracts was usually limited to the quantity and cost of expensive pigments. Letters and drawings, however, sometimes indicate the desires of patrons and artists, the terminology employed, and what visual effects certain terms implied. Several commissions for S. Maria della Steccata in Parma involving Parmigianino, Giulio Romano, and Michelangelo Anselmi are particularly relevant, since an extensive record survives of both the visual and verbal exchanges between artists and patrons.

This essay examines Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s famous statue of Apollo and Daphne in light of a tradition of poetics and art theory in which vision and touch play central roles. The interaction between these senses is explicitly figured in Bernini’s statue, which deploys all the marvels of the sculptor’s craft in the representation of the god of poetry, a sister art. The statue, created at a time when the role of the senses in both poetry and art was being scrutinized, emblematizes the poetics of Bernini’s own sculptural enterprise, which was, at this moment, undergoing its own momentous metamorphosis.

This article brings together the social history of art collections and the history of vision in a discussion of the debates surrounding the National Gallery of London’s display of art in the nineteenth century. It is argued that behind the ideas of Charles Eastlake regarding the arrangement of the National Gallery lay a new understanding of visuality, which corresponded to contemporary developments in commercial art exhibitions and the increasing attention of physiologists to subjective aspects of perception. Simultaneously, a new notion of individuality arrived via the German Romantic movement, which led to a new conception of art’s value and history.

A reference to "Zenobii Cecchi Frasche" on the inscription of Lorenzo Monaco’s Coronation of the Virgin has led scholars tobelieve that this Florentine was the patron of the altarpiece for S. Maria degli Angeli. Recent archival discoveries, however, demonstrate that this figure had been dead for nearly forty years when the polyptych was installed in 1413 and that he probably never had the resources to fund a painting of such grandeur while alive. Here, the author suggests that Zenobi’s eldest son, Domenico, was probably the true patron and that the commission may have been intended to honor his father.