Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Indecent Bodies In Early Modern Visual Culture: An Introduction, Fabian Jonietz, Mandy Richter, Alison Stewart

School of Art, Art History, and Design: Faculty Publications and Creative Activity

Indecency ‒ the polar opposite of propriety, appropriateness, respectability, decorum ‒ has played a central role in our understanding of Early Modern cultural norms since the beginning of art history as an academic field in the nineteenth century. Accordingly, the concept of indecency was fundamental to historical and contemporary discourses that attempted to balance social limits on indecorous behaviour and images. At the same time, the appeal of such visual imagery, the attraction of graphic depictions of bodies and their actions, resulted in conflicting responses on the part of viewers. Historically, decency and indecency played defining roles in both the …

Taste, Lust, And The Male Body: Sexual Representations In Early Sixteenth-Century Northern Europe, Alison Stewart

School of Art, Art History, and Design: Faculty Publications and Creative Activity

During the second quarter of the sixteenth century, Sebald Beham (1500‒1550) engraved a number of small prints with biblically related titles, Joseph and Potiphar’s Wife and Death and the Lascivious Couple. These prints, tiny enough to be held in the palm of one’s hand, show the male sexually aroused. First printed in Nuremberg and later in his new home of Frankfurt am Main, these sexual or erotic prints were popular enough to be copied by contemporaries and by Beham himself. This essay argues that Beham’s prints and their copies are part of a broader interest and taste for erotic imagery …

Field Guide To A Hybrid Landscape, Dana Fritz, Katie Anania, Rebecca Buller, Rose-Marie Muzika, Salvador Lindquist

School of Art, Art History, and Design: Faculty Publications and Creative Activity

In Field Guide to a Hybrid Landscape Dana Fritz traces the evolution of the Bessey Ranger District and Nursery of the Nebraska National Forest and Grasslands. Fritz’s contemporary photographs of this unique ecosystem, with provocative environmental essays, maps, and historical photographs from the U.S. Forest Service archives, illuminate the complex environmental and natural history of the site, especially as it relates to built environments, land use, and climate change.

The Nebraska National Forest at Halsey, as it is known colloquially, is the largest hand-planted forest in the Western Hemisphere, and formerly in the world. This hybrid landscape of a conifer …

Indecent Bodies In Early Modern Visual Culture, Fabian Jonietz, Mandy Richter, Alison Stewart

School of Art, Art History, and Design: Faculty Publications and Creative Activity

The life-like depiction of the body became a central interest and defining characteristic of the European Early Modern period that coincided with the establishment of which images of the body were to be considered ʻdecentʼ and representable, and which disapproved, censored, or prohibited. Simultaneously, artists and the public became increasingly interested in the depiction of specific body parts or excretions. This book explores the concept of indecency and its relation to the human body across drawings, prints, paintings, sculptures, and texts. The ten essays investigate questions raised by such objects about practices and social norms regarding the body, and they …

Arousal, The Bible, And Bruegel’S Codpieces: The Male Body In Early Modern Visual Culture, Alison Stewart

School of Art, Art History, and Design: Faculty Publications and Creative Activity

This essay explores varied responses to the male body, including the phallus and its sixteenth- century covering, the codpiece, that existed over the past half millennium in the visual arts during which time discomfort coexisted with more neutral or positive representations of the human form. The essay will show that images indicate no monolithic attitude toward the body, clothed or not, in the centuries emerging from the Middle Ages, thereby agreeing with Bynum that a “cacophony of discourses” existed for many aspects of life, including responses to the body. Bynum’s linking of more general Medieval attitudes to those of our …

Sex Seils: Die Erotischen Drucke Sebald Behams Im Deutschland Der Renaissance, Alison G. Stewart

School of Art, Art History, and Design: Faculty Publications and Creative Activity

Nacktheit ist ein Markenzeichen der Renaissancekunst. Albrecht Dürers unkolorierter Kupferstich Adam und Eva von 1504 zeigt den ersten Mann und die erste Frau, antiken griechischen Skulpturen nachgebildet, als Aktfiguren, die lediglich mit Feigenblättern bedeckt sind.! Auf einer Rötelzeichnung Raffaels von 1515 - das Jahr notierte Dürer auf dem Blatt, das Raffael ihm geschenkt hatte - posieren zwei kräftige nackte Männer; einer stützt sich auf einen Stab, der andere zeigt auf etwas.2 Zwischen den Entstehungszeitpunkten dieser beiden Werke auf Papier trug Marcantonio Raimondi (um 1480 - um 1530) dazu bei, dass sich die Vorstellungswelt der Renaissance und die Darstellung von Nacktheit …

New Old Stones At Antiochia In Rough Cilicia: A Novel City Name And A Proposed Visit By Hadrian And Sabina, Michael C. Hoff, Rhys F. Townsend, Timothy Howe

School of Art, Art History, and Design: Faculty Publications and Creative Activity

This article considers the evidence of newly discovered inscriptions from Antiochia ad Cragum in western Rough Cilicia and proposes two distinct observations: one, the city had an additional civic name different from that which is most commonly known; and two, the emperor Hadrian and Sabina may have visited the city and region during their journey from Egypt to Athens in 131 CE.

The excavations at the Roman-era city of Antiochia ad Cragum on the Turkish south coast have been ongoing since 2005, and since the beginning inscriptions have been discovered that shed helpful light on the history of the city. …

"Introduction" To Crossroads: Frankfurt Am Main As Market For Northern Art 1500–1800, Miriam Hall Kirch, Birgit Ulrike Münch, Alison Stewart

School of Art, Art History, and Design: Faculty Publications and Creative Activity

Table of Contents Inhaltsverzeichnis

Simple curiosity has sparked many a book, and that is true of this book, too. We wanted to know what role Frankfurt am Main played in the rise of the commercial art market in general and in particular of painting and printmaking during the early modern period. We were surprised to find no ready answer to our question, for although the Frankfurt Book Fair remains a major publishing event, art historians have not yet focused sufficiently on its precursor, the Frankfurt fair, an important location for the trade in paintings and prints. Frankfurt's hub function as …

The Importance Of Frankfurt Printing Before 1550. Sebald Beham Moves From Nuremberg To Frankfurt, Alison Stewart

School of Art, Art History, and Design: Faculty Publications and Creative Activity

Five hundred years ago, Sebald Beham had reasons enough to leave Nuremberg and more than enough reasons to move to Frankfurt. That town's attraction as a printing center became one of the factors that resulted in Beham's settling permanently in the city on the Main in 1531, leaving behind his home town of Nuremberg, best known as the artistic center of the Renaissance master Albrecht Durer. Despite the high regard the Franconian town and Durer received, the authorities there did not treat other painters in Durer's circle particularlywell. The dubbing of Beham as 'godless painter' in 1525 constituted one of …

Sebald Beham And The Augsburg Printer Niclas Vom Sand: New Documents On Printing And Frankfurt Before 1550, Alison Stewart

School of Art, Art History, and Design: Faculty Publications and Creative Activity

This essay makes known two unpublished documents from the last years of the life of Sebald Beham (1500 Nuremberg–1550 Frankfurt) and uses them as a means to explore Beham’s relationship to printing, the town of Frankfurt, and the Augsburg printer Niclas vom Sand, who remains an unwritten part of the history of the period. The essay is organized as an autobiographical retrospective by an older man forced in prior decades to move from Nuremberg and seek employment and a new life elsewhere. The end of the essay evaluates the documents and aspects of them.

The Artist's Lament In 1528. Exile, Printing, And The Reformation, Alison Stewart

School of Art, Art History, and Design: Faculty Publications and Creative Activity

The plight of painters and other artists was not an easy one when the Reformation made inroads into German-speaking lands. Commissions for Catholic subjects and altarpieces dried up as a result of Lutheran influence. Two laments dating from the early Reformation period address the artist's situation. Both are brief, date from 1526 and 1528, and appear in different contexts - one in a letter of introduction and the other in a printed pamphlet. The first concerns the painter Hans Holbein the Younger (1497/98- 1543) whose portraits painted for King Henry VIII and his court indicate that the pictorial genre of …

Previously Undocumented Art Criticism By Walt Whitman, Wendy J. Katz

School of Art, Art History, and Design: Faculty Publications and Creative Activity

Whitman’s “Letters from a Travelllling Bachelor,” written for the New York Sunday Dispatch (October 14, 1849, through January 6, 1850) are well known, as is his practice of contributing news about Brooklyn and Brooklyn artists to the Dispatch as well as to other newspapers like the Evening Post.1 But his extended description of a painting by Jesse Talbot, Encampment of the Caravan, in the Evening Post (“Encampment of the Caravan,” April 29, 1851; p. 1), and his critique of the National Academy of Design annual exhibition in the Dispatch of the following year (“An Hour at the Academy of Design,” …

Alienata Da'sensi: Reframing Bernini's S. Teresa, Andrea Bolland

School of Art, Art History, and Design: Faculty Publications and Creative Activity

Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s Ecstasy of St Teresa for the Cornaro Chapel (1647–52) is perhaps the artist’s most sensually charged creation, and the apparently physical nature of Teresa’s ecstasy is today even acknowledged in survey textbooks. Teresa herself opened the door to this reading when, in describing her spiritual ecstasy, she admitted that ‘the body doesn’t fail to share in some of it, and even a great deal’. Yet the balance between sense and spirit in the sculpture emerges somewhat differently if it is viewed (literally and figuratively) in context: as an altarpiece in a chapel where its presentation is structured …

Prairie Skin: A Quilted Shelter, Elizabeth Ingraham Dr.

School of Art, Art History, and Design: Faculty Publications and Creative Activity

Mapping Nebraska is a drawn, stitched and digitally imaged cartography (physical, social, cultural, sociological) of that state. This nine-year project, now in the permanent collection of the International Quilt Museum, includes a hand-drawn Locator Map, quilted and embroidered Terrain Squares, on-the-ground documentation or Surveys, and Ground Cloths, mixed mixed media textile constructions which respond to a particular location in a more intuitive and imaginative way.

In this public talk at the International Quilt Museum I give a visual overview of my development of the fourth component of Mapping Nebraska—a large-scale textile construction, titled Prairie Skin, designed to wrap a human …

Man’S Best Friend? Dogs And Pigs In Early Modern Germany, Alison Stewart

School of Art, Art History, and Design: Faculty Publications and Creative Activity

When Jacob Seisenegger and Titian painted individual portraits of Emperor Charles V around 1532, a dog replaced such traditional accouterments of imperial power as crown, scepter, and orb.3 Charles placed one hand on the dog’s collar, a gesture indicating his companion’s noble qualities including faithfulness.4 At the same time, another more down-to-earth meaning for the dog had become prominent in the decades before the imperial portraits: the interest in and ability to eat anything in sight. This pig-like ability resulted in dogs, alongside pigs, becoming emblems of indiscriminate and gluttonous eating and drinking during the early sixteenth century when humanists, …

Feasting And Drinking: Proverbs In Early Sixteenth-Century Woodcut Illustrations, Alison G. Stewart

School of Art, Art History, and Design: Faculty Publications and Creative Activity

Der Artikel behandelt zwei Sprichwörter, die in der Nürnberger Druckgraphik zwischen den Jahren 1524 und 1535 veröffentlicht wurden. Die im Zentrum stehenden Drucke wurden von Hans Sebald Beham angefertigt, einem Schüler Dürers, der auch als ,gottloser Maler' bekannt war. Sowohl die Bedeutung der Wendungen durcheinander wie Kraut und Rüben und die trunken Metten werden anhand dieser Drucke erforscht, als auch die Quellen, die zur Identifikation vornehmlich des zweiten, heute nicht mehr gebräuchlichen Sprichwortes dienen. Weiterhin werden die weit verbreiteten Darstellungen von Trinkgelagen näher untersucht. Wichtige Quellen, die zur Identifikation dieser Sprichwörter führen, sind Titelblätter und Textillustrationen von gedruckten Flugblättern und …

Sebald Beham: Entrepreneur, Printmaker, Painter, Alison Stewart

School of Art, Art History, and Design: Faculty Publications and Creative Activity

The prints of Sebald Beham and his brother Barthel were the subject of a recent exhibition titled Gottlosen Maler at the Albrecht-Dűrer-Haus in Nuremberg (March 3–July 3, 2011), where this essay was included in the exhibition catalogue in German. Revised and expanded for publication in this journal in English, the essay addresses Beham’s biography and historiography and argues that Beham should be viewed as a highly creative and productive entrepreneur and as one of the first “painters” (to use terminology of the time) to specialize in prints. Between 1520 and 1550, he produced a prodigious number of prints.

Sebald Beham (From The Exhibition Catalogue Die Gottlosen Maler Von Nürnberg, Alison Stewart

School of Art, Art History, and Design: Faculty Publications and Creative Activity

The prints of Sebald Beham, and his brother Barthel, were the subject of a recent exhibition titled Gottlosen Maler or Godless Painters at the Albrecht-Dürer-Haus in Nuremberg, Germany (March 3-July 3, 2011), where this essay was included in the exhibition’s catalogue in German. The essay addresses the biography and historiography of the “godless painter” Sebald Beham, a pupil of Albrecht Dürer, who received the nickname "godless painter" because of his radical pronouncements in Reformation Nuremberg when the town was on the eve of becoming Lutheran. The essay argues that Beham should be viewed as a highly creative and productive entrepreneur …

The William Suhr Papers At The Getty Research Institute, Alison G. Stewart

School of Art, Art History, and Design: Faculty Publications and Creative Activity

This article will describe the collection known as the William Suhr Papers in the Getty Research Institute and its contents, explain who Suhr was and when and where he was active, what his papers have to offer, and why consulting them should be considered by both researchers interested in twentieth-century paintings and painting restoration and by art historians and historians engaged with Germany and the vicissitudes of immigration between the two World Wars. I will also address my involvement with the Suhr Papers within the context of Pieter Bruegel’s Wedding Dance painting in the Detroit Institute of Arts and how …

Terraria Gigantica: The World Under Glass, Dana Fritz

School of Art, Art History, and Design: Faculty Publications and Creative Activity

Photographs by Dana Fritz

Terraria Gigantica examines the world’s largest indoor landscape complexes: Biosphere 2 near Tucson, Arizona; the Desert Dome and Lied Jungle at the Henry Doorly Zoo in Omaha, Nebraska; and the Eden Project near St. Austell, Cornwall, UK. The project’s title refers to these enclosed structures that permit near-total control of temperature, humidity, insects, weeds and irrigation to allow the cultivation of species and creation of a landscape that would otherwise be impossible in that particular climate. Each an architectural and engineering marvel when built, they continue to stand as working symbols of our current relationship with …

Easier Said Than Done--Returning Stolen Art To Its Owners: Review Of Michael J. Kurtz, America And The Return Of Nazi Contraband: The Recovery Of Europe's Cultural Treasures, Alison Stewart

School of Art, Art History, and Design: Faculty Publications and Creative Activity

The return of "cultural treasures" stolen by the National Socialists is the subject of a burgeoning field in print and film; Michael J. Kurtz's book of 1985 is here revised and updated to include the events of recent decades: the end of the Soviet Union and a divided Germany, along with the reemergence of looted art and lawsuits seeking to reclaim it. As Kurtz states in his introduction, "cultural restitution is an ongoing phenomenon" (p. x). This situation is all too clear from Kurtz's book and parallel developments in the last few years. This extremely rich work continues to be …

Woodcuts As Wallpaper: Sebald Beham And Large Prints From Nuremberg, Alison G. Stewart

School of Art, Art History, and Design: Faculty Publications and Creative Activity

Large works on paper, in particular ones that covered walls, were new in the realm of printed works of art during the early decades of the sixteenth century. Following in the footsteps of wall hangings and tapestries of the late medieval period, wallpaper became a new concept in the Renaissance. Although wallpaper has generally fallen in and out of favor in the past several decades, it recently has been experiencing its own renaissance with visual artists. At the Rhode Island School of Design, a 2003 exhibition entitled On the Wall: Wallpaper by Contemporary Artists featured wallpaper with a variety of …

Expelling From Top And Bottom: The Changing Role Of Scatology In Images Of Peasant Festivals From Albrecht Dürer To Pieter Bruegel, Alison Stewart

School of Art, Art History, and Design: Faculty Publications and Creative Activity

During the first half of the sixteenth century, the earliest visual representations of peasant festivals in European art were produced in Germany. These works, all prints, showcase peasants expelling their drink with the result that art historians today, nearly 400 years later, have described these prints as gross and indecent. In their revulsion and distancing from sixteenth-century Germany’s insistently colorful visual and verbal vocabulary, art historians of Northern European art appear to have stressed both the values and preferences of their own twentieth-century culture and that of the sixteenth-century Netherlands rather than those of the society that produced them—sixteenth-century Germany. …

Distaffs And Spindles: Sexual Misbehavior In Sebald Beham’S Spinning Bee, Alison Stewart

School of Art, Art History, and Design: Faculty Publications and Creative Activity

Sebald Beham from Nuremberg designed his Spinning Bee woodcut around 1524 (Figure 1) as a medium-sized work of approximately 1 ft by 1.5 ft, printed on two sheets of paper glued side by side. A large number of individuals are included and most are women, significantly so because spinning bees served as meeting places for rural girls and women where they would spin and amuse themselves during the fall and winter evenings. Beham’s print is the first surviving example of a spinning bee in visual art and one of the first substantive examples of the theme in any form. The …

Preface & Introductions To Saints, Sinners, And Sisters: Gender And Northern Art In Medieval And Early Modern Europe, Jane L. Carroll, Alison Stewart

School of Art, Art History, and Design: Faculty Publications and Creative Activity

Our goal was to create an anthology that could be used as a supplemental reader by undergraduates and graduate students when studying Northern European art before the eighteenth century. We agreed with our cohort group that there was a need to excite students with the new questions being asked in traditional fields of study. The secondary purpose was to allow colleagues to assess the state of gender-driven scholarship in the art history of Medieval and Early Modern Northern Europe. As it progressed, however, this project became in our minds a celebration of the multiplicity and exuberance of the new production …

Head Of A Jester, Gregory Davies, Alison Stewart

School of Art, Art History, and Design: Faculty Publications and Creative Activity

Bite your tongue, or is it your lip? That is precisely what the fool, or jester, in the Large Head of a Jester (figure 89) is actively engaged in doing as he looks out in the direction of the viewer. A gift of the Trier-Fodor Foundation, this anonymous, German engraving of c. 1600 was acquired by the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, in 1985. Image and text of this medium-sized print measure 360 x 277 mm; the sheet 402 x 312 mm. The laid paper bears a watermark of a shield incorporating a fat fleur-de-lys, or possibly a clover leaf. …

Taverns In Nuremberg Prints At The Time Of The German Reformation, Alison Stewart

School of Art, Art History, and Design: Faculty Publications and Creative Activity

During the sixteenth century, representations of taverns and inns increased in both prominence and number within the visual art of northern Europe. From Hieronymus Bosch to Pieter Bruegel, painters and designers of prints made images employing taverns and inns as the setting for religious and secular subjects. Bosch’s panel painting of a traveling merchant, variously titled the Wayfarer, Peddler, and the Prodigal Son, from ca. 1510), includes one of the earliest renderings of the tavern or inn in European art. Traditional interpretations of the work’s subject as the Prodigal Son underscore the religious and moralizing meanings both painting and inn …

Sebald Beham & Barthel Beham, Alison Stewart

School of Art, Art History, and Design: Faculty Publications and Creative Activity

The brothers (1) Sebald Beham and (2) Barthel Beham, whose oeuvre consists mainly of prints, belonged to the third generation of this Nuremberg family and were among the artists known as Little Masters because of the diminutive size of many of their engravings and etchings. They were much influenced by the work of Albrecht Dürer and are often referred to as his “pupils,” though it is unclear if the contact was solely through his prints rather than personal. Sources of inspiration included the work of artists such as Raphael and Marcantonio Raimondi, then widely available in engraved form. Following these …

Large Noses And Changing Meanings In Sixteenth-Century German Prints, Alison Stewart

School of Art, Art History, and Design: Faculty Publications and Creative Activity

Woodcuts produced by the Nuremberg school during the early sixteenth century provide insights into the history of taste, in particular the changing nature of the bawdy aesthetic so prevalent in the art of the time. Sebald Beham's Nose Dance of c. 1534 (fig. 170) offers a good case in point.' The print represents in the foreground a group of large-nosed men and one woman, and a fool who exposes himself (at lower right). By the early seventeenth century the woodblock had been altered, removing most of the offensive areas -- the large noses and some of the revealed body parts …

The Kermis Woodcuts Of Sebald Beham In Reformation Nuremberg, Alison Stewart

School of Art, Art History, and Design: Faculty Publications and Creative Activity

Sebald Beham's kermis prints, published in Nuremberg from 1528 to the mid-1530s, are discussed within the context of kermis as a popular festival in Nuremberg. The kermis images, created at the time the Lutheran Reformation was taking hold in Nuremberg, are shown to be both extensions of that festival celebrated throughout Nuremberg's countryside and of the town council's attempts to control or halt most of the celebration. In contrast to recent studies stressing the peasant class and criticism of it at kermis, and the viewer's distance from what is represented, this essay shows that members of all social classes enjoyed …