The Art Bulletin

Abbot Suger’s art program at St-Denis has long been credited with the reintroduction of “allegory” into Western art after centuries of disuse. A new understanding of that reintroduction is caught up in a web of previously unrecognized issues: that inventing the exegetical stained-glass window acted as a justification of the monastic use of art, that this claim was contradicted by new thought on art and the senses, that this new art appeared first not at St-Denis but elsewhere, and that the construction of a new elite art for the literate layperson emerged from all this.

The treatment of Veronica’s veil in Federico Zuccari’s The Encounter of Christ and Veronica on the Way to Calvary reflects less the significance of the relic venerated at St. Peter’s, Rome, than the artist’s intention of inscribing the narrative of the veil within a Christocentric image. By emphasizing narrative and the replication of Early Christian prototypes, such as icons, medallic portraits of Christ, and late medieval woodcuts, Zuccari opposed his painting to the devotional and iconic parameters set by post-Tridentine ecclesiastical patrons and theorists, more concerned with establishing continuity with the Apostolic past and the classical beauty of Greco-Roman art.

Nuns in New Spain (colonial Mexico) wore spectacular flowery trappings when they professed and again when reposing on their funeral biers. Local artists, commissioned by the nuns’ families and convents, captured these stunning images. Despite differences in ethnicity, religious order, age, and other factors that distinguished these women, their flowery trappings have the effect of establishing an iconic image of the New Spanish nun. Furthermore, their regalia, which combine Euro-Christian and Mesoamerican practices and beliefs, not only represented the preeminence of the “brides of Christ,” they also conjured the spiritual transformations that nuns experienced in their ritual lives.

Katsushika Hokusai’s 1831 woodcut Under the Wave off Kanagawa, popularly known as The Great Wave, occupies an iconic place in modern visual culture. Looking at the sociocultural context in which Hokusai’s iterations of this motif were first produced and consumed helps to explain why this image was singled out from the Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji of which it was a part. Waves served to express a range of ideas, practices, and even materials associated with the West. Their heroic forms became critical sites for exploring Japan’s shifting geopolitical circumstances, especially the country’s vulnerability to foreign invasion.