The Art Bulletin

The “Aeneas” panel, a much-discussed element of the Ara Pacis, is usually interpreted as the Trojan hero’s sacrifice of a brood sow on his landing in Latium, a story recounted in Virgil, Varro, and Dionysios of Halikarnassos. This study reexamines the relief and relevant texts and concludes that the scene instead probably portrays the second king of Rome, Numa Pompilius, as the ideal of the peaceful ruler, in contrast to Romulus, the warlike ruler, on the balancing panel. This interpretation raises broader questions about the relationship of visual art, texts, and modern theory in the study of Roman sculpture.

A beautiful miniature illustrating the Transfiguration of Christ, radically different in style from anything else in the Ottoboni Gospels, has been interpreted as a later addition to this Carolingian book. This article proposes that it was contemporary with the rest of the book and planned for inclusion in it but executed by an independent master painter not permanently attached to the writing center where it was produced. The article also proposes that some individual artists of effectively professional character who could be employed on special high-prestige projects played a more important role in early medieval illustration than is usually believed.

This paper examines the motif of the dance as an affective moment in Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s frescoes for the Sala dei Nove, in Siena’s Palazzo Pubblico. The remarkable insect imagery of the dancers' dresses is shown to relate to a late medieval current of naturalism, and the masked dance is revealed in this context as a metaphor for generation. The paper argues that Ambrogio’s dancers, through their appeal to the viewer’s subjective experience, mask a youthful vitality, which may be taken as a measure of the desire for commonwealth, not just as a political abstraction but also as a living reality.

The expressive content deduced from the style and form of Vignola’s unusual cortile is set within the context of previous circular courtyards. While the meaning shared by all such courtyards dovetails closely with the common concerns of their patrons, the unique features of the Villa Farnese courtyard reveal the special interests of its patron, Cardinal Farnese. Our understanding of his outlook is much enlarged by consideration of the porticoes' decoration and the conceit of the courtyard’s central cistern, which suggests phallic and colpic symbolism. The essay demonstrates that the courtyard represents the culmination of the villa’s entire decorative program.

In seventeenth-century Holland female buyers and sellers dominated the visible commerce of the cities' marketplaces. Those marketplaces had come to bear the burden of symbolizing a nation’s values, rooted in the activity of economic exchange. Paintings of the market were opportunities for this society to categorize, scrutinize, and question the nature of women’s desire in the public sphere, a desire that balances uneasily between the erotic and the material. These images negotiate conflicting ideals concerning the material wants of women as consumers and women’s status as alluring (yet ideally virtuous) performers in a public spectacle of femininity.