The Art Bulletin

Recognized as an attempt to reconcile contemporary artistic trends with the traditional function of altarpieces, Raphael’s Transfiguration embodies the stakes inherent in the shift from icon to narrative in early cinquecento religious painting. Reading it as a visio-devotional program makes sense of its combination of two unrelated narrative subjects—long an interpretative puzzle—which together embody an ascent from physical appearances to spiritual, imageless contemplation. A consideration of exegetical texts and the period’s theology of vision shows that the altarpiece points, through its presentation of the transfigured Christ, toward the ultimate goal of all devotion: the beatific vision.

Although Gustave Moreau remains associated with Decadence or Symbolism, in reality he was, above all, an innovative history painter. The analysis of Salon paintings from 1860 to 1869, together with their critical reception, shows how Moreau reinvented history painting. Rejecting the theatrical paradigm, he cultivated “contemplative immobility”: instead of staging figures that interact in a historical drama, Moreau created immobile, allegorized, mythological figures. The exclusion of conventional narrative techniques, combined with the use of complex allegory at a time when the latter had become obsolete, rendered his paintings enigmatic. Moreau was thus able to endow history painting with the poetic indeterminacy of the polysemic symbol.

After nearly ten years of training in France, the artist Kuroda Seiki returned to Japan to mark his professional debut with the exhibition of his controversial painting Morning Toilette (1893). Kuroda’s painting of a nude woman standing before a mirror was first shown publicly in Paris and Tokyo but did not gain widespread recognition and notoriety until its display at the Fourth National Industrial Exhibition held in Kyoto in 1895. Receiving both public censure and official distinction, the painting embodied the conflicted ambition of the host city and the nation at large to modernize and revitalize Japanese art.

Peter Behrens’s enigmatic Dombauhtte at the 1922 German Exhibition of Applied Arts has received little scholarly attention. A small masonry pavilion revealing heavily sublimated iconographic references, it embodies aspirations for cultural renewal that have attended the motif of the medieval masons’ lodge since Romanticism: the deep metabolism of religious life is imported into aesthetics as a Gesamtkunstwerk. In the absence of built and photographic resources, recourse is made for the first time to folios of Behrens’s drawings. These make possible a complete rendering of the building, which uncovers the underlying geometric order governing the plan, elevation, and disposition of artifacts.

The Minimalist canon has been largely restricted to a core group of New York–based artists, cast as materialists, while sidelining their “idealist” Californian counterparts. Yet the movement’s foremost patrons—Giuseppe Panza di Biumo and Dia Art Foundation founders Heiner and Fariha Friedrich—encompassed East and West Coast artists alike in their distinctly spiritualized vision of Minimalism. Over time, these patrons would substantially affect the development and the institutional framing of the movement, in part by funding epic projects to function effectively as pilgrimage sites. Claims that this auratic version of Minimalism represented a distortion are evaluated and partly questioned here.