The Art Bulletin

The medieval icon was experienced not simply through sight, as in visual studies and museums today, but also through touch, sound, smell, and taste. Nor was it static: the icon became animated in its interaction with the faithful. Its rich, highly reflective materials and surface textures, combined with its setting—flickering candles and oil lamps, sounds of music and prayer, the fragrance of incense, and the approach and breath of the faithful—saturated the material and sensorial to excess. It led to a vision that transcended this materiality and gave access to the intangible: a taste of the divine.

Armenia has occupied a marginal position within the study of art history. An examination of the church of Mren (ca. 640), however, illustrates the dynamic role played by the region during the Middle Ages. Built at the crux of confrontations between Byzantium, Persia, and Islam, the church reified a network of alliances from the imperial to the local level. Its sculpted and inscribed portals, moreover, responded to the often volatile audiences of the frontier. During one of the most devastating and chaotic of centuries, the Transcaucasus produced solutions of striking creativity in churches that shaped and preserved public memory.

Although the art historical importance of the Isaac Master is widely acknowledged, few have questioned the meaning of his frescoes Isaac Blessing Jacob and Isaac Rejecting Esau in the Upper Church of S. Francesco, Assisi. A Franciscan text written about a decade before these were painted offers new insight into their message: a definition of the character and mission of the Friar Minor. At a time of contention over the meaning and practice of the Franciscan Rule, Jacob is shown as an exemplar of Franciscan brotherhood, humility, and evangelization, themes further developed in scenes of Joseph, Benjamin, and Saint Francis.

In the last decades of the fifteenth century, it became common for panel paintings in the Netherlands to be copied and serially produced. It has been argued that many of the most frequently produced compositions of the period derived their authority from famous cult objects. A reexamination of these works suggests that many were not subordinate to exceptional, cultic prototypes. Instead of pointing to authoritative models, these copies took their place in a series of images of equal status, whose repetitions established the “origin” of their authority.

Théophile Silvestre’s Histoire des artistes vivants was the most important largescale project of contemporary art critical biography of nineteenth-century France. Although it remained unfinished, it broke major new ground in the production of art criticism. It was the first publication to include photographic reproductions of paintings, and corresponding explicitly to the photographic process was an experimental text based on the direct quotation of the artists’ own words. As a lawsuit in 1856 showed, this innovative “photographic” approach to image and text raised critical questions about the image and status of the modern artist in this formative period.

The Via della Conciliazione is the thoroughfare that leads to St. Peter’s basilica in Rome. Designed under the Fascist regime in 1936 by Marcello Piacentini and Attilio Spaccarelli, it is often dismissed as a reprehensible intervention in a historic site. However, it managed to carry out the long-sought restructuring of the Vatican Borgo area; succeeded in framing St. Peter’s, with its problematic facade, in a new vista; made concrete the union of church and state authorized by the Lateran Pact, imperative to Mussolini’s political agenda; and exemplifies strategies of urban planning widely used in Fascist Rome.