The Art Bulletin

The outlines of an authorial relationship between Giotto, Francesco da Barberino, the Tuscan polymath, poet, and image inventor, and Petrus de Abano, the Paduan scientist, can be traced by reexamining two personifications abovethe north door of the Arena Chapel, part of the Virtues and Vices cycle. The shared motif of branchlike antennae-eyes is based on the extramission theoryof vision. The intellectual relationship between Giotto and Francesco casts light on the design of the Arena Chapel's pictorial program, as an exercise notonly in iconographic innovation but also in visual rhetoric in an age before art theory.

In 1693 the indigenous artist Francisco Chivantito completed the Virgin of Montserrat, devoted to the titular saint of the church in Chinchero, Peru. Illustrating an Iberian holy image and landscape, along with Inca elites and architecture, this painting weaves Andean symbolic and spatial understanding with European painting conventions to create a multivalent image that encompassed both Roman Catholic teachings and indigenous understandings of sacredness and history. Chivantito’s layered narrative addressed the realities of life in the indigenous parish and also affords one of the few known examples of a local landscape illustration in a colonial Andean painting.

In 1860s Paris, it became evident that the form of artist-model transaction that predominated within academic praxis, calling for a professional model to assume a stationary pose in the artist’s studio, was inherently at odds with the Realists’ commitment to representing modern life. Casting about for alternatives, Manet replaced professional with proprietary models. While this substitution seemed to embody an alternative Realist studio practice, a close reading of the development of atelier paintings by Fantin-Latour, Whistler, and Bazille demonstrates that it compelled avant-garde artists to negotiate the standards of decorum that governed gender relations in bourgeois culture.

The music listener in European art attained a newfound prominence from 1880 to 1900. The extraordinary focus on listeners, previously dismissed as passive vessels unworthy of pictorial attention, reflects the role of Wagnerism and Symbolism in overhauling notions of aesthetic experience. Contemporary developments in philosophy and psychology favored the listener, independent even of the music that gave him or her this identity. Presaged by Degas and furthered by artists such as Fantin-Latour, Khnopff, and Vuillard, the new image of the listener marks an uneasy paragone episode in which painters sought for their own art the prestige accorded to music.

A unique medium developed in the 1930s by Diego Rivera and manipulated by the Museum of Modern Art to demonstrate the technique of fresco and the iconography of public art in Mexico, the portable fresco neglected to convey the monumentality and social grounding of muralism. In 1940, however, Jose´ Clemente Orozco overhauled the medium in order to communicate more effectively the goals of Mexican public mural painting to audiences in the United States, revealing the failure of cultural institutions and diplomatic efforts to usurp completely politicized art from Mexico.

The First Disk of 1913 marks the culmination of Robert Delaunay’s pioneering move into full abstraction following his break with Cubism in 1912. Having rejected Cubism’s insistence on the conceptual (what we know of an object) over the perceptual (how we see an object), Delaunay sought to ground painting in a reformulated understanding of vision consistent with modern optical theory. From his 1912 Window series to The First Disk, Delaunay’s paintings articulate a model of vision in which knowledge and sensation necessarily cooperate in the act of viewing—ultimately demanding that the viewer literally learn how to see..

For his 1970 Whitney Museum solo exhibition, Robert Morris turned the museum into a “construction site” with his large-scale process pieces. He then closed the show early as part of a New York art strike to protest the Vietnam War. Investigating the historical circumstances surrounding Morris’s embrace and subsequent denial of hard-hat labor reveals a crisis of political art at this moment, particularly within the context of the New Left’s vexed relationship to workers. This exhibition has disappeared from Morris’s reception, yet it altered his artistic trajectory and enacted a pivotal redefinition of artistic labor in postwar American art.