The Art Bulletin

From the Reformation onward, the monumental screens erected at the boundary of nave and choir in Western Gothic churches have been perceived as barricades, self-consciously designed to exclude the lay faithful from liturgical activities. Concentrating on surviving thirteenth-century examples, this study offers an alternative understanding of the purposes and reception of choir screens. Analysis of the liturgical and social functions of the structures and the iconography and style of their sculpture program reveals, contrary to traditional assumptions, a conscientious effort by clerical patrons to address, engage, and incorporate their lay flocks that is analogous to contemporary preaching practices.

During the Renaissance, the Venetian Treasury, the Palazzo dei Camerlenghi, housed an extensive pictorial cycle that encompassed work by the city’s leading painters. The significance of this massive scheme, subsequently dispersed, remains largely unrecognized. This article seeks to reintroduce the scheme to critical consciousness with the aid of new pictorial reconstructions and an account of its development. Concentrating on Bonifacio, Veronese, and Tintoretto, who made the largest contributions, the author focuses on how the state was able to manipulate the process of commissioning works of art as a way of engendering the corporate ethos of Venetian society.

This study addresses the emergence of the thematically unified church interior in seventeenth-century Italy. Already in the late sixteenth century there was an impulse toward coordinated altarpiece programs, but in the majority of cases there were too mnay impediments to their completion. Using a case study of S. Maria Maggiore in Bergamo, this essay argues that as a result of these problems, coherent programs emerged in spaces not occupied by altars. Once freed from the spatial boundaries of chapels, artists created cycles encompassing the entire space of the church, like those at New St. Peter’s and S. Giovanni in Laterano.

David’s Telemachus and Eucharis is traditionally seen as a light mythology. Yet the work invites awareness of the didactic and historical implications of representing Fénelon’s Télémaque, written for Louis XIV’s heir over a century before. Fénelon’s widely read pedagogical text was viewed by the philosophes and other writers as having announced the reforms of the Enlightenment and the Revolution. Produced in exile under the Restoration, David’s Telemachus is the work of a moraliste observing his vulnerable hero between passion and reason, and of an aging painter reflecting on history’s cycles and the slow accumulation of wisdom through experience.

Although scholars have recognized antirationalist premises undergirding the Italian Futurists' rejection of parliamentary politics, the intergal role of Futurist aesthetics in that polemical project has yet to be elucidated. Through an examination of Umberto Boccioni’s Futurist tract Pittura scultura Futuriste: Dinamismo plastico (1914) and works such as his Unique Forms of Continuity in Space (1913) and Carlo Carrà’s Funeral of the Anarchist Galli (1911), I explore the Futurists' incorporation of French philosopher Henri Bergson’s theories of time and space into a utopian campaign to transform the consciousness of the Italian citizenry and inaugurate a political revolt against Italy’s democratic institutions.

From the mid-1960s until 1995, West Mexican burial effigies were developed as brand mascots for Kahlúa, a Mexican-made liqueur. These effigies had otherwise remained relatively unknown to Euro-American audiences throughout the twentieth century, mainly because their makers' personal and cultural anonymity and the effigies' lowly medium, formal quirks, and locus of production marked them as primitive and peripheral. This chronicle demonstrates the particular malleability of objects deemed primitive by those who collect and display them and suggests that the shifting tone and emphases of Kahlúa’s print ads reflect changing attitudes toward Mexico and the primitive in the United States.