The Art Bulletin

Manipulations of time, ranging between moments and centuries, pervade Rogier van der Weyden’s Columba Altarpiece. They occur mainly among elements that have been considered forthright iconographic details or unremarkable scenery, including a cityscape, the star of the Magi, a figure among the Magi’s followers, and a beggar. While several such temporal expressions find interpretive resonance in Scripture, patristic commentary, and sermons, their collaborative density in the altarpiece contrives a uniquely animated structure of meaning. Among unusual visual alignments that solicit exegetical attention from an observer, precisely charged relationships project backward and forward through history.

The monumental quattrocento tombs in the Florentine Badia for the jurist and diplomat Bernardo Giugni, d. 1466, and the monastery’s legendary founder, Count Hugo of Tuscany, d. 1001, are typically--but unjustifiably-- described as simple imitations of the tombs in S. Croce for the Florentine chancellors Leonardo Bruni and Carlo Marsuppini. Like their more famous predecessors, Mino’s tombs offer an allegorical discourse on public virtue. By evoking, transforming, and integrating a variety of visual and historical sources, Mino created a sophisticated visual and symbolic language that serves to commemorate two particular individuals and the virtues of justice and charity that they embodied.

Three paintings by Domenico Gargiulo of the revolt of Masaniello in 1647 have been interpreted as an anti-Spanish commentary. Close analysis of the events depicted in Gargiulo’s major painting of the revolt and of the political sympathies of his patrons, however, reveals the contrary to be the case. In this and other paintings, Gargiulo reinforces conventional stereotypes of the Neapolitan lower classes as fundamentally capricious and irrational. These negative visions of popular anarchy are to be contrasted with the propriety, unity, and stability displayed by the establishment in Gargiulo’s other pictures of contemporary events.

To commemorate the Great Fire, the Corporation of London commissioned Christopher Wren to design the Monument. This article identifies its formal sources in ancient Roman triumphal columns and in a sixteenth-century fluted Tuscan Doric column in Paris, in the inscription on the Column of Trajan, and in a passage from Ammianus Marcellinus. Textual models for the Latin inscriptions on the pedestal include Suetonius’s Augustus, Seneca the Younger’s Epistle no. 91, and Tacitus’s Annals. The political situation in Restoration England cast references to Tacitus into oblivion, yet this commission demonstrates how Wren’s knowledge of Latin had a determining effect on his architectural practice.

Modern art emerged in Romania under circumstances foreign historically, politically, and culturally to those prevailing in the industrialized West. Moreover, the artists responsible for creating an originary Dada and a singular form of Constructivism, among other modern expressions, were perceived as foreigners in their own land. The present study offers an analysis of the aesthetic, ethnic, and social contexts that resulted in a singular history of modern art in Romania, one that would play a decisive role in the evolution of modern art in the West.

This look at a previously unexamined exhibition of modern French art held in Berlin in 1937 contributes a new perspective on the Socialist government of Léon Blum and sheds new light on the Nazi reception of non-German modern art. It demonstrates that the exhibition, co-sponsored by the governments of France and Nazi Germany, corresponded to agendas of both. The French wanted it to serve as propaganda and advertisement, and they made sure it contained nothing offensive to their host. The Germans thought the art, through contrast, would highlight their idea of a national racial tradition.