The Art Bulletin

The prestige of poets in China is well known, but much remains to be done to elucidate the cultural practices that produced and maintained this privileged position. This reconstruction of one dimension of Li Bai’s (701-762) persona suggests both the popularity of certain poets for many segments of Chinese society and the diverse social and political functions served by the "personality" and "life" of such a literary giant. In exploring complex interactions among objects in various media, published vernacular fiction, and the performance arts, the author highlights untapped resources for further study and issues complicating attempts to interpret them.

Sculptures of Shiva Nataraja, dancing in his ring of flame, may be the best-known objects of Indic art. Their fame and their academic interpretation derive in large part, however, from an essay by Ananda K. Coomaraswamy that oversimplifies the visual icon’s links to written documents and that represents texts composed in the thirteenth century as contemporary with this image type, although sculptures of Nataraja survive from the early tenth century. Evidence from the tenth century suggests his significance rather as the wild lord of the cremation ground and as an emblem of the Chola dynasty.

Best known as the opening phrase of a familiar Latin prayer, the angelic salutation (Luke 1:28) frequently appears in medieval images of the Annunciation. However, the history of these images begins in the Greek-speaking world, as does the tradition of using the same words as a prayer for Mary’s protection and mediation. Arguing that the inscribed images were intended to serve as catalysts to prayer, this article examines their appearance on some early Byzantine pilgrimage objects, in the oratory of Pope John VII, in a pair of late medieval Books of Hours, and in Simone Martini’s St. Ansano Altarpiece.

The question about the vertical discontinuity of the piers framing the center portal in the lower story and those framing the rose window in the Siena Duomo facade, a preoccupation of the scholarship devoted to the subject, is herein resolved. This feature is but one of a series that belongs to the conventional iconography of medieval Tuscan church facades. This observation leads to a reassessment of the Gothic component of the Duomo facade and to suggestions about how, for the architect, the patrons, and the beholders of the facade, imported stylistic elements and the regional Romanesque relate to one another.

The classical technique known as the ars memorativa--a system for reinforcing the memory by generating mental images within architectural spaces--has been much discussed by art historians concerned with its implications for the visual arts in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Here a passage on "striking" images from the Rhetorica ad Herennium (first century B.C.E.) is juxtaposed with a Gospel account of Christ’s Passion as a way of reconfiguring our usual assumptions about the iconography and style of late medieval devotional images, specifically the Crowning of Thorns and the Portrait of Christ.

This essay examines a set of images of Berthe Morisot that édouard Manet painted between 1868 and 1874. Through close analysis of the paintings themselves, the cultural context in which they were created, and what we know of the relationship between Morisot and Manet, I conclude that these images are inscribed by a sense of both artistic rivalry and personal infatuation. My focus on elaborate and complicated uses of paint and canvas and the inclusion of certain objects like fans and veils challenges previous readings of these images as simple portraits of a bourgeois woman by a friend and colleague.

This essay argues that in late nineteenth-century Paris a crucial shift occurred in the status of pictorial shadow: vanguard artists began to conceive of shadow as an expressive entity in itself rather than merely an accessory to form. Credited with the ability to reveal the intrinsic essence of things, shadow, particularly as silhouette, offered a means to make visible internal truths rather than outward appearances. Shadow’s thematization in art, experimental theater, and other entertainments marked a decisive aesthetic transition, and it also reflected the larger impulse of late nineteenth-century thought to explore the less material aspects of being.

Poetist picture poems involved the typographic arrangement of poems combined with collage and photomontage, all of which was regarded by the Czech avant-garde group Devetsil as a new sign system of visual and tactile, rather than verbal character. The Czech artists of the 1920s believed that this new nonverbal sign system would reawaken the senses so that in the future socialist society one could fully enjoy all sensory effects. This society would abolish the division of labor and end art as a specific sphere of activity; art would comprise all human activities, even sports, gardening, or cooking.