The Art Bulletin

Between 1422 and 1425 a new reliquary was made for the prestigious Florentine relic of Apostle Philip’s right arm. Although it was kept at the baptistery of S. Giovanni, the form of the Saint Philip reliquary was inspired by several key elements of Florence Cathedral’s design and decorative program. This essay will argue that this was done in order to present the reliquary as a potent and explicit symbol of the bond between the protective power of the saint whose relic it contains and the city of Florence--a symbol whose meaning was fully realized only through ritual performance.

When Poussin depicted epidemic disease in his Plague of Ashdod (1630-31), medical theories linking the imagination to health considered such disturbing subjects dangerous, even as objects of thought. Poussin’s image, however, was fashioned to immunize the viewer against the very disease it depicts, through application of Aristotle’s tragic catharsis. This hypothesis is developed through comparisons with Raphael’s Morbetto and Boccaccio’s account of plague. Other paintings by Poussin, The Empire of Flora, Landscape with a Man Killed by a Snake, two self-portraits, and The Vision of Saint Francesca Romana, are also discussed in terms of art’s impact on health.

Théodore Chassériau’s monumental cycle for the Cour des Comptes in the Palais d'Orsay, Paris, executed between 1844 and 1848, was a crucial exponent of the mid-nineteenth-century revival of mural painting and its concomitant, allegory. This essay proposes that the artist reanimated outdated conventions by structuring the ensemble so as to incorporate visitors into a visual narrative drawing on the vernacular of colonial rhetoric and debate pertaining to Algeria. The testimony of Théophile Gautier, parallels with contemporary discourse, and references to archaeological excavations in Algeria suggest further that the program resonated with themes central to France’s involvement in Africa

This article proposes a new reading of Courbet’s The Meeting. The argument draws on French proverbs and expressions to show that complex significations of class, subservience, ridicule, and sovereignty clustered around such details in the painting as hats, beards, and canes. The essay suggests that the intersection of the linguistic and the visual produces a web of meanings thus far unexplored in Courbet’s canvas. Through a focused analysis of a specific painting, the article aims to engage in dialogue with earlier methods of art historical interpretation. In doing so, it proposes other possibilities of signification and analysis.

View of New York, Sheeler’s 1931 depiction of his photography studio, reflects a pivotal moment in the artist’s career, the moment when he decided to subordinate his work in photography to his ambitions as a painter. The painting also points to a critical moment in the history of American photography, in which Sheeler’s personally expressive style began to be supplanted by a documentary aesthetic. The shift in status, leadership, and taste in American photography provides a revealing context for evaluating Sheeler’s paintings and photographs from this period and for understanding the career change immortalized in View of New York.

This essay uses the historiography on Albrecht Dürer and Matthias Grünewald to argue that while the distinction between past and present is an indispensable device for historical writing, it is one for which no essential definition can be offered. The changing nature of the distancing techniques developed to keep the past at bay offers fascinating insight into the character of the assumptions brought to interpretation by individual scholars, as well as the way in which historical narratives respond to the social agendas of the cultures that create them.