The Art Bulletin

This article examines the conceptions underlying the designation of certain pictures as "Chinese narrative illustration" and proposes to define a more consistent body of visual material about which meaningful generalizations can be made. Although there is no such category in traditional Chinese writings about pictorial art, the term is frequently encountered in modern scholarship, as demonstrated here by a review of typical examples of its varied uses. Arguing against such diverse conceptions of the term, the author proposes to limit it to pictures relating to a "story" in which something "happens," and she discusses its functions and modes of representation.

This article examines the signatures on Venetian paintings from about 1440 to about 1550. It argues that painters' signatures are one means of documenting the arrival of Renaissance taste and artistic practice in Venice and its development through the period. Furthermore, they index the changing business practices, professional status, and self-regard of Venetian painters.

Thomas Gainsborough’s full-length portrait of Ann Ford was designed to impress but took risks in picturing a woman musician whose public performances had caused a scandal. This article analyzes the painting as relating to that scandal and communicating formally something of the problems women faced in performing in public. It considers Ford’s biography, the pictorial references contained within her image, and how each fits within the histories of the ways in which women’s roles were being redefined during the evolution of a commercial society in later eighteenth-century Britain.

This essay examines Francisco Goya’s Saint Francis Borgia at the Deathbed of an Impenitent, 1788, in relation to late eighteenth-century aesthetic thought in Spain. Although modern scholarship has focused on the emergence of the supernatural in this work, a neglected contemporary analysis by Pedro de Silva, an adviser to the Madrid and Valencia royal academies, provides a point of departure for the examination of Goya’s depiction of the dying sinner. Within this context, it is argued that the painting marks a significant crossroad in Goya’s representation of the human figure.

In architectural writings from about 1830 to the present a great many buildings are consistently described as divided between structures that represent one period style and ornament another. Why are Romantic historicists, early twentieth-century formalists, and contemporary contextualists all in agreement about the binary nature of these buildings? An examination of the literature on one such monument, St-Eustache in Paris, considers the covert, problematic function of "structure/ornament" as a spatially conceived narrative device; its relationship to "transitional" architecture; its (often unacknowledged) figurative significations; and its status in contemporary discourse as a discovery rather than a historically contingent invention.

This essay challenges the notion that Pissarro’s relationship to tradition was one of rupture and argues that an attention to the art of the past enabled him to transform what he imagined to be the aims of painting, landscape painting in particular. As is made clear by an analysis of the commentary of such critics as Zola, Duret, and Baudelaire, landscape painting and its perceived partialness provided the means by which Pissarro investigated the nature of human vision and his vision and represented the relationship between an embodied painter-viewer and the things he sees (or sees himself touching).