The Art Bulletin

The first-century Roman monument of Eurysaces, also known as the tomb of the baker, was long thought to be the commission of an ostentatious ex-slave, owing in part to its perceived similarity to the fictional tomb commission of Roman literature’s most vulgar freedman, Trimalchio. This essay suggests alternative ways to consider the tomb, namely, from the possible perspectives of ancient viewers in the context of Roman funerary practice. It shows how Eurysaces' monument frankly celebrates his baking enterprise and argues that the tomb’s unconventional use of architectural form and decoration was a strategy for Eurysaces to make himself memorable.

In a postmodern world, the most important task in the study of Chinese painting history is the description of a different visual language and its special meaning. This cannot be accomplished without a means of dating early Chinese paintings, which demands knowledge of a history of mimetic representations in Chinese art. Only then can changes in visual language be traced and their meaning understood. The author suggests that through the late thirteenth century, human genius was the agency that brought creativity into a universe lacking a monotheistic Creator, but subsequently, individuality or selfhood was considered the agent of change.

The Quinatzin Map of about 1542, a Nahua pictorial history from Tetzcoco (Mexico), represents the pre-Hispanic past of the city and its royal dynasty. After the Spanish Conquest in 1521, indigenous rulers and their families absorbed Spanish and Catholic culture, but they never stopped being or seeing themselves as Nahuas. Commissioned by members of an indigenous royal family, the Quinatzin likewise could be two things at once, and it encompasses the same distinctively colonial range of experience and expression. The manuscript must be read in light of both indigenous systems of meaning and its primarily Spanish public context.

This essay compares the earnings of various painters included in the recent exhibition The Genius of Rome with wages of common workers, incomes of the middle and wealthy classes, and the cost of living in Rome, particularly the basic expenses of food and rent. The criteria for pricing paintings, which usually were negotiated in scudi, and the cost of making paintings also are discussed. The results suggest that the established painters from the time of Caravaggio and the Carracci until the election of Urban VIII (1623) belonged to a surprisingly lucrative profession.

This article examines the idea of the triumphal bridge from the Renaissance to Piranesi, by way of Flavio Biondo, Onofrio Panvinio, Pirro Ligorio, Nicolas Poussin, Fischer von Erlach, and Filippo Juvarra, in order to explore attitudes toward the reception and representation of ancient architecture. It shows how the eighteenth-century theme of the "magnificent (triumphal) bridge" had its roots in topographical inquiry and examines the contribution that Piranesi’s interest in the archaeological problem of the triumphal bridge made to the creative process that resulted in the Ichnographia, the large map of the ancient Campus Martius in his 1762 Campo Marzio.

Representations of Mediterranean and Latin culture as linked to traditions of freedom and harmony in the writings of élisée Reclus, Pierre Kropotkin, Guy de Maupassant, and Stendhal suggest an alternative to the usual association between the political right and the Latin ideal. I argue that this cultural geography informed Neo-Impressionist Paul Signac’s vision of an anarchist future to be situated on France’s Mediterranean shore. With such an alternative cultural construct, Signac reconfigured the classical pastoral, using its inherent capacity for juxtaposition to claim the Mediterranean coast as a site for politically critical avant-garde art.