The Art Bulletin

In the dry season of 775-76 CE, the ruler of the Maya polity of Copán, Honduras, dedicated an inscribed and historiated table altar in the West Court of the Copán Acropolis. Now recognized as Copán Altar Q, the work commands an important place in the historiographic construction of high civilization in lower Mesoamerica. A close reading of the work reveals a complex project of historical, dynastic, and spatial world making. Altar Q fashioned a highly particular construct of history and viewing experience, reading and bodily encounter, embedding the rhetoric of ritual performance with the sculptural language of the monumental relic.

The spectacular western chapels in the Church of Our Lady at Ingolstadt exemplify the techniques used to empower the Gothic in the sixteenth century. The branch work and floral shapes in the vaults partake of the general vogue for vegetal imagery about 1500. A structuralist perspective can be applied to such organic carvings, which usually accompany nonrepresentational architectural forms. Together, they comprise a binary system in which each element is defined through its opposition to the other. The profuse vegetal imagery and technically daring double-layer vaults represent the cutting edge of Gothic design in the early sixteenth century.

De Witte’s painting of 1660 presents a visual paradox, for it reintroduces into this Calvinist interior a number of images that had been banned or destroyed during and after the sixteenth-century iconoclast movement. Different modes of picture making are not simply opposed here. Rather, the powers of the old religious image are linked with the generation of new kinds of secular images, pointing to a larger contradiction: the often fraught dynamic between Calvinism and visual culture emerges as a force that not only provoked iconoclastic destruction but also had the potential to initiate the creation of new images.

Wright’s Grady Gammage Memorial Auditorium for Arizona State University (1959-64) was the last public building that he designed. It was modeled on his project of 1957-58 for an opera house in Baghdad, Iraq, and was related to his project of 1957 for a new Arizona state capitol. All these designs exemplified Wright’s belief in a regionally varied modern architecture incorporating history and landscape and opposing the International Style. Baghdad’s opera house reflected postwar Iraqi ideology and Wright’s views of Islamic and earlier architectures. The design’s adaptation to postwar Arizona’s desert entailed reworking the theater’s acoustics, exterior form, and material symbolism.

In the religion known as Espiritismo in Cuba and Puerto Rico, readily available, commercially produced statues of Indians (Native Americans) are used in its altars. Comparing Espiritismo’s altar arts, a severely understudied aspect of the practice, as well as related altars of the New Orleans Spiritual Church, leads to the theory that certain stylistic and iconographic signifiers may derive, in part, from central African (Congo) masquerades and sculpture. It seems that in addition to being the first inhabitants of America, Indians, in figure and image, became a substitute for lost African ancestors as well as loci for special spiritual power.