The Art Bulletin

Built by the emperors of the Flavian dynasty, the conical fountain known in antiquity as the Meta Sudans appears on imperial coins and medallions issued by the emperors Titus, Domitian, Alexander Severus, and Gordian III. The enduring imperial interest in the fountain can be attributed to the monument’s topographic and ideological associations with Augustus and the legacy of imperial Rome, associations that inspired the building of similar fountains in North Africa as well as the use of conical fountains as numismatic symbols of Rome in the cities of Corinth in Achaea and Nikopolis in Epirus.

When the Spanish viceroy Antonio de Mendoza first visited Michoacán, Mexico (about 1539), he commissioned a Franciscan friar to record the indigenous customs of the region. The friar, together with local native nobles and artists, produced the illustrated manuscript known as the “Relacíon de Michoacán.” One of these indigenous artists transformed the European Tree of Jesse, a motif depicting Christ’s genealogy, to represent the local indigenous noble family. Such an act of mimicry and appropriation allowed the artist to represent the native nobles as the rightful rulers of Michoacán and to communicate this conviction to the manuscript’s colonial audience.

Modern scholars have often judged Raphael’s Fire in the Borgo to be a disappointment. It has been criticized for a lack of proportion, narrative, and structural coherence and for its awkward Michelangelesque nudes. However, rather than as a tired pastiche executed by assistants, it might better be understood as Raphael’s argument for a new theory of painting derived from the literary texts being produced at the court of Pope Leo X. Specifically, the Fire in the Borgo asks to be evaluated according to Pietro Bembo’s new criterion for evaluating a work of literature: Petrarchan pleasantness (piacevolezza) over Dantean gravity (gravità).

In 1884, the Japanese painter Kano Hōgai exhibited an early version of his Merciful Mother Kannon (1888) in Paris. The fact of the painting’s exhibition abroad provides a basis for reconsidering its long-debated iconographic and historical significance. Taken in the context of the Meiji period (1868–1912), it aspires to a legibility that transcends the particularities of iconography through what was assumed to be the universal truth of the human body. Symbolic devices and painterly references anticipate the requirements of different viewers, thus inviting multiple interpretations and provoking a tacit consensus among viewers of different political and cultural backgrounds.

The Combines that Robert Rauschenberg produced between 1953 and 1956 represent a “queering” of Abstract Expressionism and, by extension, the culture of postwar modernism itself, through the artist’s pronounced use of decoration. The decorative materiality of his work is overlooked by current scholarship, which frames the Combines as either a postmodern allegory of representation or an iconographically read revelation of his gay identity. An alternative view is to refuse biography and draw on queer theory’s opposition to legible—and legislated—identity to read the decorative as a queerly deconstructive strategy deployed to undermine postwar American art’s grand narratives of subjectivity.

Contemporary art became prominent in public media, markets and museums, and art-world discourse during the 1990s, eclipsing most previous art. Since then, it has become a burgeoning art historical research field, yet its academic status remains ambiguous, its position in relation to art criticism is contradictory, and its goals and procedures are radically undertheorized. Nonetheless, the concept of the contemporary offers as rich a resource for understanding art within contemporaneity as did the concept of the modern for art within modernity, as revealed by this survey of the concept’s emergence, history, and current status in art historical discourse.