The Art Bulletin

In the Northern Song Water Mill scroll in the Shanghai Museum, the humble water mill is a monumental subject of court painting and a symbol of imperial power. The imperialization of water mills and the proficiency of artists at rendering complex machinery and architecture arose in response to economic and technological advances and new demands of patronage. Contemporary water mill literature further contributed to the machine’s transformation into a metaphoric embodiment of the efficiency and benevolence of good Confucian government. The Water Mill offers visual evidence of Northern Song national development as a result of government-sponsored programs.

Michelangelo and his younger contemporary Rosso Fiorentino were formed within an artistic culture that grappled with a tension between two modalities of the image: on one hand, as manifestation of divine authority and authentic object of devotion and, on the other, as emotionally affecting and illusory simulation of presence--including divine presence--created by human virtuosity. The notion of the "divine" artist became attached to Michelangelo in particular, and Rosso and others reacted in certain works that questioned the legitimacy of his enterprise. This critique, internalized in turn by Michelangelo himself, determined the transgressive character of his later monumental works.

Although we tend to treat the medium as a modern notion, it was possible to think about the topic in earlier periods as well. This essay looks at one place where that possibility emerges, in the discussions of art that appear in the literatures of magic and demonology. The article considers two models on which both demonologists and artists understood the medium: as the usually invisible yet always perceptible "air" that joins all things, and as the "binds" that could ensnare and move the targets of one’s spells.

This article uses the recent controversy regarding the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas as a paradigm to challenge essentializing notions of an "Islamic" response to the image. Beginning with a history of premodern iconoclastic practice in the Islamic world, it explores the reception of the Bamiyan Buddhas in light of evidence for a complex range of responses to Buddhist and Hindu images in Afghanistan. Finally, it relates the destruction of Buddhist antiquities in 2001 not to a timeless theology of images but to the role of the museum as the locus of a secular iconolatry characteristic of the modern nation-state.