The Art Bulletin

Focusing on the ceremonial exchange of gifts on New Year’s Day (the étrenne) at the Valois courts, this essay examines gift giving in late medieval court society. Based on visual clues culled from a few surviving objects and book presentation scenes as well as on information from inventories and household accounts, the performative context of the étrennes and a typology of gifts are reconstructed. Central to the argument is the notion that objects and images brought a key ingredient to rituals of gift giving that I propose to name, after Jean Starobinski, a "surplus of visibility."

While many of their details remain unexplained, the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch (d. 1516) provide strong patterns of viewing, which offer moral instruction through directed sight. His triptychs frequently read from left to right, from Eden to Hell. Most of Bosch’s works reveal a vision of Heaven or of Christ only to the most perceptive of viewers, those who can discern this insight amid the distractions and temptations of a demonic setting. Bosch even thematizes both sight and moral insight in his Seven Deadly Sins, where the eye of God forms the central image.

Burlesque, one of the most fashionable literary genres in seventeenth-century France, aimed to amuse the informed reader by poking fun at lofty material from the past, especially the Aeneid. It is argued here that a playfully irreverent burlesque attack on the canons of ancient and Italian art was carried out in the gardens of Versailles by a group of eight statues of satyrs and nymphs, and that Charles and Claude Perrault, the authors of several burlesque "epics," were the wits behind the program. The conceit has broad implications for our understanding of Louis XIV’s Versailles.

What is the cultural impact of disruptive, catastrophic upheaval--such as massive epidemic--and how does its impact get translated in artistic representation? Exploring the peculiar cultural, social, and biomedical parameters shaped by the great cholera epidemic of 1832 in Paris, this article focuses on Eugène Delacroix’s small portrait of the Italian violinist-composer Niccolò Paganini, who performed in Paris in 1831 and 1832, as the circumstantial product and symbolic focus of newly minted, intersecting medical, intellectual, moral, social, and aesthetic discourses in the early July Monarchy.

The exhibition of Ingres’s Martyre de Saint Symphorien at the 1834 Salon provoked one of the most memorable artistic controversies of the nineteenth century. Although couched in terms of aesthetics, the debate over the picture was ultimately rooted in social and political conflicts of the early July Monarchy. Frustrated over the painting’s failure to garner universal approbation, Ingres renounced participation in the Salon. This decision amounted to more than a knee-jerk reaction to bad press, however; it was motivated by the artist’s growing sense of disillusionment over the official exhibition’s inability to accommodate his highly personal, particularized brand of art.

Angel DeCora was the best-known Native American artist of her generation but she is generally omitted from histories of "modern" Native American art. Working at a time when United States Indian policy was dedicated to eradicating Native identity, DeCora fought for the participation of Native Americans in modern American cultural and political life. This essay demonstrates the formal and conceptual modernity of DeCora’s work. It explores her sophisticated engagement with contemporary social and aesthetic theory and argues that her paintings, illustrations, and designs draw on these ideas to represent the transcultural condition that defines modern Native American experience.