The Art Bulletin

The conventional interpretation of the set of nine early seventh-century silver plates known as the David Plates sees them as an allegory of events in the reign of the Byzantine emperor Heraclius (610-41 c.e.). This article challenges such readings and argues that the plates can best be understood in terms of the Christianization of late Roman silver’s tradition of depicting mythological heroes so as to appeal to the common educational culture (paideia) of their elite owners and viewers. From this perspective, they shed new light on Byzantium’s transformation of the secular visual culture of the Roman Empire.

Jacques Daret’s Presentation in the Temple spoke to early fifteenth-century audiences of differing analytical abilities and backgrounds. Drawing on sources ranging from Latinate theology to vernacular texts and local customs, imagery in the panel concerns issues pertinent to both theologians and literate and illiterate lay citizenry. While its references to the Immaculate Conception and witty manipulation of a Latin inscription engaged only the learned, allusions to Arras’s famous thaumaturgical relic, the Sainte Chandelle, reached a broader audience. Further, its staging of Mary’s purification as a churching, the contemporary ritual following childbirth, held special appeal for Arras’s female community.

This study focuses on François Boucher’s 1758 portrait of Mme de Pompadour at her toilette to explore cultural meanings implied in Boucher’s painting and to reevaluate how the Rococo has been traditionally understood. The converging discourses of art making, "femininity," artifice, and social class that inflect the picture are examined here. Also considered is how anti-Rococo art criticism became entwined with a critique of public women centered on the use of cosmetics, with each contributing to a devaluation of the Rococo as feminine and to a devaluation of "femininity" in the Enlightenment critique of elite culture.

This article explores the interplay among tomb design, death ritual, and collective memory in France, during and after the Revolution, through the veneration for historic mummies, incarnations of its problematic past. From the standpoint of physicality, a defining Enlightenment value, this study considers historically linked cases: the seventeenth-century marshal Turenne, exhumed at St-Denis in 1793, and Napoléon, who ordered Turenne’s apotheosis at the Invalides in 1800 and then himself became the miracle mummy of the 1840s. This cult, I propose, contributed to the reemergence of death imagery in French tombs and influenced the form of tombs for liberal martyrs.

When the Stevens family of Hoboken, New Jersey, commissioned twelve paintings by seven leading American artists in 1826 and then installed them in its new Hudson River steamboat, the Albany, it constituted one of the earliest important instances of arts patronage by a private business in the United States. The Albany collection included paintings by Birch, Doughty, Cole, Vanderlyn, Sully, and Morse. In this essay, I reconstruct this historically influential collection and explore its significance for the Stevenses who commissioned it, for the artists who contributed to it, and for travelers who could have seen it in its original installation.

This article seeks to delineate the influence of spiritualism and Swedenborgianism on the work of Hiram Powers. In examining how these faiths guided his response to dreams, visions, premonitions, Mesmerism, folk customs, and childhood experiences, we come to realize that Powers’s statues were more immediately engaged in the current issues of American culture than hitherto realized. This is especially true of his California (1850-57), in which he attempted to express doctrines associated with American exceptionalism and Manifest Destiny in terms of ideals associated with the vitalistic religions the artist had embraced.

This essay positions Robert Smithson’s 1969 Artforum article "Incidents of Mirror-Travel in the Yucatan" within the American travel narrative tradition. Smithson intended his trip to be an "anti-expedition" to John Lloyd Stephens’s antebelleum travels to Yucatán, and his project performs sophisticated, multilayered inversions of Stephens’s nineteenth-century ethnocentrism. But Smithson, informed partly by 1960s-style primitivism, indirectly perpetuated many of Stephens’s attitudes. The essay will focus on Smithson’s transformation of a stereotypical Latin American "indifference" into a template for his own methods of "dedifferentiation" and for his own scrupulously indifferent response to the political upheavals of the late 1960s.