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2015

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Articles 1 - 11 of 11

Full-Text Articles in Ancient, Medieval, Renaissance and Baroque Art and Architecture

Book Review Of A. Victor Coonin, From Marble To Flesh: The Biography Of Michelangelo’S David, Sandra Cheng Oct 2015

Book Review Of A. Victor Coonin, From Marble To Flesh: The Biography Of Michelangelo’S David, Sandra Cheng

Publications and Research

Beginning of Book Review:
“What makes an icon?” is the underlying question of A. Victor Coonin’s book dedicated to Michelangelo’s statue of David. The larger-than-life-size David has a status akin to Leonardo’s Mona Lisa. Its image, whether whole or fragmented, is instantaneously recognizable, making it difficult to look at it afresh, but Coonin manages to reflect on well-trodden ground in a captivating manner. This study demonstrates how the David is more than an embodiment of masculinity but a statue imbued with multi-faceted symbolism that continues to resonate with viewers today.


"Moving Mortals To Tears And Devotion": Cinzio Passeri Aldobrandini, Torquato Tasso, And The Sorrowing Virgin, Karen J. Lloyd Jul 2015

"Moving Mortals To Tears And Devotion": Cinzio Passeri Aldobrandini, Torquato Tasso, And The Sorrowing Virgin, Karen J. Lloyd

Art Faculty Articles and Research

Torquato Tasso was inspired to pen his Stanze per le lagrime di Maria Vergine santissima e di Giesù Cristo nostro (Rome, 1593) by a painting of the sorrowing Virgin belonging to Cardinal Cinzio Passeri Aldobrandini (1551–1610). A nephew of Pope Clement VIII by his sister, Cinzio took on the Aldobrandini name in a practice known as an “aggregation.” The publication of Tasso’s Lagrime allowed Cinzio to promote himself as a devout prelate favored by the pope, but it did not ensure his influence and a true “blood” nephew, Pietro Aldobrandini, successfully challenged his authority. This essay examines the status of …


Lucas Cranach's Samson And Delilah In Northern European Art, Jacqueline S. Spackman May 2015

Lucas Cranach's Samson And Delilah In Northern European Art, Jacqueline S. Spackman

School of Art, Art History, and Design: Theses and Student Creative Work

This thesis explores images of Samson and Delilah in northern Europe in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. My research focuses primarily on Lucas Cranach’s painting, Samson and Delilah of 1528-30, in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. By examining prints and decorative artworks that include the Samson and Delilah narrative, it is my goal to understand where Cranach’s painting fits into the larger art historical picture. Through examining the locations and suggested meanings of other works, I hope to establish that it is also possible to understand the intention and meaning behind Cranach’s painting. I analyze the work …


Between Historical Truth And Story-Telling: The Twentieth-Century Fabrication Of “Artemisia”, Britiany Daugherty Apr 2015

Between Historical Truth And Story-Telling: The Twentieth-Century Fabrication Of “Artemisia”, Britiany Daugherty

School of Art, Art History, and Design: Theses and Student Creative Work

This research focuses on the twentieth century rediscovery of the seventeenth-century Italian painter Artemisia Gentileschi by scholars, novelists, playwrights, filmmakers, and artists. I argue that the various authors who told her story constructed two distinct “Artemisias,” what I identify as the “Academic Artemisia” and the “Celebrity Artemisia.” The “Academic Artemisia” results from writings by scholars focused on her 1610 Susanna and the Elders, who used approaches from formalism and connoisseurship, to feminism and iconography. The “Celebrity Artemisia” stems from popular fictions that refashioned the life and art of Artemisia according to pop culture tastes. Studying what has been said about …


Motherhood In The Feast Of St. Nicholas, Rukmini Girish Apr 2015

Motherhood In The Feast Of St. Nicholas, Rukmini Girish

Audre Lorde Writing Prize

No abstract provided.


Coelum Britannicum: Inigo Jones And Symbolic Geometry, Rumiko Handa Jan 2015

Coelum Britannicum: Inigo Jones And Symbolic Geometry, Rumiko Handa

Architecture Program: Faculty Scholarly and Creative Activity

Inigo Jones’s interpretation that Stonehenge was a Roman temple of Coelum, the god of the heavens, was published in 1655, 3 years after his death, in The most notable Antiquity of Great Britain, vulgarly called Stone-Heng, on Salisbury Plain, Restored.1 King James I demanded an interpretation in 1620. The task most reasonably fell in the realm of Surveyor of the King’s Works, which Jones had been for the preceding 5 years. According to John Webb, Jones’s assistant since 1628 and executor of Jones’s will, it was Webb who wrote the book based on Jones’s “few indigested” notes, on …


The Artist's Lament In 1528. Exile, Printing, And The Reformation, Alison Stewart Jan 2015

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 …


Alienata Da'sensi: Reframing Bernini's S. Teresa, Andrea Bolland Jan 2015

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 …


Finding Aid To The Collection Of Vernon Lee Materials, Violet Paget, Colby College Special Collections Jan 2015

Finding Aid To The Collection Of Vernon Lee Materials, Violet Paget, Colby College Special Collections

Finding Aids

The Vernon Lee Collection at Colby College contains over 1000 letters, 136 manuscripts and articles, 117 photographs, and a small number of personal documents and artifacts, spanning the years 1866-1960. First and subsequent editions of Vernon Lee titles are described in the Colby Libraries web catalog. Materials arranged in seven series: Correspondence from Vernon Lee, Correspondence to Vernon Lee, Manuscripts, Published Writings, Photographs, Personal Items and Artifacts, and Clippings.


Joseph’S Dream In The Thomson Collection: Reconsidering The Reconstruction Of The Infancy Of Christ Window From Suger’S Saint-Denis, Michael Watt Cothren Jan 2015

Joseph’S Dream In The Thomson Collection: Reconsidering The Reconstruction Of The Infancy Of Christ Window From Suger’S Saint-Denis, Michael Watt Cothren

Art & Art History Faculty Works

No abstract provided.


Robot Saints, Christopher B. Swift Jan 2015

Robot Saints, Christopher B. Swift

Publications and Research

In the Middle Ages, articulating religious figures like wooden Deposition crucifixes and ambulatory saints were tools for devotion, techno-mythological objects that distilled the wonders of engineering and holiness. Robots are gestures toward immortality, created in the face of the undeniable fact and experience of the ongoing decay of our fleshy bodies. Both like and unlike human beings, robots and androids occupy a nebulous perceptual realm between life and death, animation and inanimation. Masahiro Mori called this in-between space the “uncanny valley.” In this essay I argue that unlike a modern person apprehending an android (the uncanny human-like object that resides …