The Art Bulletin

In the article "From Mozarabic to Romanesque in Silos" Meyer Schapiro radically reoriented his approach to medieval art. Style remained the focus, but it was converted from the object of formal analysis in which historical forces had little or no role into the visual reflection of the social milieu of its executors. This was a Marxist approach, prepared for by Schapiro’s depression-era preoccupation with the issue of socially responsible art. Despite its stylistic matrix, his argument depended on an unprecedented invocation of historical conditions. It is here evaluated, and deflated, through a critique of Schapiro’s reading of these conditions.

Exploring the monastic engagement with image and text, this article presents a new interpretation of the content, meaning, and function of the main narthex portal at Vézelay, one of the most famous monuments of medieval art. The portal simultaneously visualizes texts (the account of Pentecost in Acts and a passage from Paul’s Epistle to the Ephesians) and depicts the public Mass, celebrated within the spaces the doorway announces. In so doing, the portal bridged the gap between biblical past and lived present and infused the activities of its medieval viewers, entering and using the basilica beyond, with profound spiritual significance.

Recent feminist assessments of Rubens’s Marie de Médicis cycle have focused primarily on the pictorial role played by the queen. This study shifts attention to the cycle’s feminine personifications by examining France, a recurrent figure whose bodily presentation, including gender, changes markedly through the cycle. The various personae that France adopts--Amazon, cavalier, goddess--are interpreted through theories of fashion and theatrical role-playing, both preoccupations of the seventeenth-century French court. It is argued that Rubens’s portrayal of France is itself profoundly theatrical in relying on the shifting surfaces of the body to configure an "androgynous" French nation.

This essay compares the old Waldorf-Astoria of 1897 with the new Waldorf-Astoria of 1931. It documents those shifts in architectural programming, service technologies, labor practices, and economic strategies by which the hotels maintained their spectacle of exceptional extravagance. Through an analysis of MGM’s two films the Oscar-winning Grand Hotel of 1932 and its 1945 remake, Weekend in the Waldorf, the author argues that the distinct ways in which the two hotels marked the territory of their elite patrons may be figured as totem and fetish.