The Art Bulletin

According to a story told in the Andes today, the ancient Inka (Inca) married Mother Earth and produced human offspring. Rock outcrops that were integrated by Inka builders into masonry structures can be understood as traces of that union. By providing petrous foundations for Inka walls, the Mother Earth herself appears to have readily consented to, if not actually joined in, Inka building activity. As a place of union between Inka and earth, the integrated rock outcrop thus constituted a powerful sign of belonging, as well as an imperialist claim to the possession and assimilation of new territories.

In his first Supper at Emmaus (National Gallery, London), Caravaggio deftly manipulated the conventional techniques of Renaissance narration to create an unheard-of kind of pictorial narrative, one that structurally incorporates ambivalence and subjectivity. As a narrative text, it is interwoven with multiple references to a preexisting iconography, intrinsically informed by the reflection and inventiveness of Renaissance artists from Bellini and Titian to Paolo Veronese. One of the major problems that Caravaggio had to solve was how to convey the complex notion of a divinity simultaneously visible and invisible.

In 1865 Jean-François Millet copied many passages from Montaigne, Palissy, Piccolpasso, Grimm, Germaine de Staël, and Charlotte Brontë, confirming the erudition evident in his letters. In his 1865 Salon review, Alfred Sensier, writing under the name Jean Ravenel, used some of these copies supplied by the artist; he quoted from Millet's letters and from the latter's heretofore undated and little-known manifesto “Notes sur l'art,” to make Millet his undisclosed collaborator. Millet's extracts, featuring sixteenth-century writers, give evidence of the distinctive character of his naturalism, a “rustic language” corroborated by his own collection of sixteenth-century art.

One of the most heated controversies of modern scholarship, the 1901 “Orient or Rome” debate was inflamed by the simultaneous publication of two books. While Italian archaeologist Giovanni Rivoira argued for the origin of Western architecture in Roman ingenuity, Austrian art historian Josef Strzygowski contended, “The true source of Western artistic genius is located in the Indo-Germanic Geist,” pointing instead to Iran. Between 1896 and 1926, Iran's intelligentsia not only engaged one side of the debate in claiming sociopolitical hegemony but also invented an eclecticism that echoed Strzygowski's Aryan architecture and destabilized universalistic discourses on artistic purity and cultural hybridity.