The Art Bulletin

In 2001, restoration of Ste-Marie d'Oloron uncovered a pagan sculpture hidden within the fabric of the French cathedral's Romanesque portal. A stone slab in the tympanum, displaying on its obverse a depiction of the Virgin Mary, the cathedral's patron saint, bears on its reverse an image of the ancient Roman god Mars. The rediscovery of the idol exposes pictorial relations and textual responses to the antique sculpture in the portal's visible decoration that implicate the pagan image in the cathedral's Christian dedication. This perhaps unprecedented use of spolia communicated its deep significance through performance of the liturgical rites themselves.

A major monument of Late Gothic Austrian art, the Passion Altarpiece in the Holy Blood Church in Pulkau was installed about 1520. Anti-Jewish violence, the accusation of host desecration, and a papal investigation into the affair accompanied the church's fourteenth-century foundation and shadowed its subsequent career. Amid the pre-Reformation pilgrimage boom, the altarpiece relegitimated the contested shrine by supplanting its spurious bleeding host with an authorized cult image of the intercessionary Man of Sorrows; thereafter, both narrative and cultic programs mediated Christian memories of the town's slain Jewish inhabitants while imagining a Jewish “prehistory” for the urban site itself.

The ideas of the Neapolitan philosopher Giovanni Battista Vico attracted little attention during his lifetime, except in Venice, where his works found an enthusiastic audience. Giovanni Battista Tiepolo's early ceiling fresco in the Palazzo Sandi (1725-26) offers a unique example of how contemporary Venetian intellectuals read Vico's work. It appears that Tiepolo's patrons based the iconography of their salone on Vico's Universal Law (1720-22) and first New Science (1725) to illustrate the main tenets of the myth of Venice, a political fiction that legitimized the class structure of the republic and the absolute legislative and judicial authority of its aristocracy.

In mid- to late-nineteenth-century Paris, walking emerged as a significant pictorial theme, especially among Impressionist painters, who depicted not just the flaneur but also everyday pedestrian practices in the remodeled city. The history of writing about walking insists on its coherent intertwining of body, mind, and vision. That context reveals how the paintings exploit that integrated triad of faculties, complicating our sense of Impressionist practice as primarily optical. Cast as flaneurs, those painters evoke the walking experience with a phenomenological acuity that belies the prevailing notion of the flaneur as noteworthy chiefly for his gaze.

In a vexing moment in the reception history of a Chinese art treasure in the British Museum, two Japanese Nihonga masters, Kobayashi Kokei and Maeda Seison, copied the Admonitions of the Court Instructress (Nushi zhen tujuan) picture scroll attributed to the figural master Gu Kaizhi (ca. 344-ca. 406). Considered globally, the long-ignored transcription, made in and at the behest of the museum in 1923, illustrated the effects of world politics on art. Locally, the experience of copying the Chinese masterpiece had a major impact on the artistic development of the copyists, sent to Europe to study Western painting techniques.