The Art Bulletin

In fifteenth-century Urbino, Duke Federigo da Montefeltro upheld policies of toleration that offered Jews only limited social forbearance but forestalled expulsion and extermination. Although the Jews of Urbino did not suffer the expulsions and pogroms endemic elsewhere in Europe, they endured symbolic forms of violence. This essay explores how the Urbino Corpus Domini Altarpiece functioned in Duke Federigo’s campaign of toleration and how the dynamics of tolerance were inevitably linked to violence. Painting served to represent to the Christian society the duke’s policy on Jews and to define the limits of tolerable behavior for non-Christians dwelling in the community.

This article addresses the hitherto unstudied Turkish-inspired architecture designed and built by the twice-deposed king of Poland Stanislas Leszczynski during his exile in France in the eighteenth century. It demonstrates that there are strong parallels between these designs and the outer garden kiosks found at Topkapi Palace in Istanbul. Focusing on stylistic subtleties and the context of political marginalization, the article interprets the function of Stanislas’s kiosks as means for self-representation. In its discussion of Ottoman architecture, the study also questions the notion of culture as an autonomous, monolithic entity and argues that the interaction was highly complex and open-ended.

Jean-François Millet’s two most celebrated paintings of peasant life, The Gleaners and The Angelus, debuted in the late 1850s to hostility and obscurity respectively, and both paintings initially commanded low sale prices. They have contributed to the artist’s reputation as a marginalized avant-garde Realist painter. This essay traces the shift in Millet’s reputation through these two paintings during the early Third Republic (1871-91), arguing that their unprecedented celebrity demonstrates his successful insertion into a campaign to construct a republican cultural legacy for the nation. It is a case study of the institutional embrace of socially critical paintings and their maker.

Timothy H. O'Sullivan’s survey photographs possess distilled graphic qualities that have captivated and puzzled viewers for several decades. Focusing on pictures from the Wheeler survey (1871-79), this essay argues that O'Sullivan fashioned his distinctive pictorial strategies from the graphic practices of other survey specialists. The historical evidence suggests that he was compensating for the shortcomings of photography as an instrument of geologic and geographic work and amplifying the political persuasiveness of his pictures. Certain of his images, however, betray indications of skepticism concerning the survey and the very graphic values that he took such pains to incorporate.

Bauhaus experiments in stage and theater design took place both on and off the premises, frequently in the context of costume parties and other festivities. Such efforts re-created the human body--literally and symbolically, onstage and off--in the shape of the doll, a creature embodying both empathy and estrangement and flourishing in the realm of photography. Anonymous and androgynous, Bauhaus dolls engaged with abstraction both individually and in groups; they blurred distinctions between performers and spectators and increasingly exemplified the bond between gender and mass culture to provide models of subjectivity and spectatorship for the Weimar Republic.

The Intimate Gallery (1925 to 1929) was Alfred Stieglitz’s first commercial venture dedicated solely to American modern art. The article compares the gallery with Stieglitz’s photographs from the same years, his images of the sky known collectively as the Equivalents, and proposes that a period-specific concept of spirituality informed the aesthetics of both projects. Central to Stieglitz’s beliefs was the idea that bodily experience and spiritual knowledge were intertwined. He thus fostered an understanding of both the gallery and his photographs as interanimating agents, suggesting that the viewer’s empathetic response to the art would catalyze a spiritual epiphany.

Motivated by the conviction that Leo Steinberg’s "The Philosophical Brothel" is at once the most powerful interpretation to date of Picasso’s Demoiselles d'Avignon and itself the victim of repeated misinterpretation, this article undertakes a careful rereading of Steinberg’s text. By drawing out its repeated references to Nietzsche and The Birth of Tragedy while simultaneously exploring the essay’s relation to earlier art historical writing, as well as the significance of language and "voice" within it, the present article aims to open its own readers to a radically different experience of both "The Philosophical Brothel" and its demanding subject, Les demoiselles d'Avignon.