Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Leonardo’S Ancient Inspiration, Willem N. Roelandts

CAFE Symposium 2023

Investigating the hidden ancient inspiration in Leonardo de Vinci’s 'Battle of Anghiari' and it’s significance to the city of Florence. How and why Leonardo chose to incorporate Greco-Roman aesthetics into his art.

Botticelli's Adoration Of The Magi: The Power And Beauty Of Individual, Trang B. Nguyen

CAFE Symposium 2023

Adoration of the Magi in Uffizi was a commission from banker Guasparre dal Lama for his chapel in Santa Maria Novella. The altarpiece was painted by the famous artist Sandro Botticelli. It illustrates one of the most famous scenes in the Bible: The Epiphany of the three Magi greeting the birth of Jesus who would bring salvation and peace to the world of sins. This beautiful piece now resides in Uffizi Museum in Florence. Adoration of the Magi represents the peak of Renaissance art, and carefully reflects the political message of Florence in the 15th century through the figures of …

Don’T Die A Woman If You Want Your Own Way: Idealization Of Florentine Noblewomen Through Posthumous Renaissance Portraiture, Asha Fletcher-Irwin

Art History Senior Papers

Renaissance women’s portraiture served a narrative purpose for the patron, always informed by whether the painting’s subject was alive at the time of painting. My own interest in posthumous portraiture came from a single sentence in renowned Renaissance scholar Patricia Simons’ article on the identification of Tornabuoni women in the Santa Maria Novella. She wrote of Ghirlandaio’s fresco of Giovanna Tornabouni, painted after her death, in which he copied a profile portrait done during her lifetime but decided to further idealize it.^[1] Renaissance portraiture was never accidental, and female Florentine portraiture of the era was particularly riddled with symbolism. …

The Spiritual Nature Of The Italian Renaissance, Kaitlyn Kenney

Senior Honors Theses

This study seeks to investigate the influence of faith in the emergence and development of the Italian Renaissance, in both the artwork and writing of the major artists and thinkers of the day, and the impact that new expressions of faith had on the viewing public. While the Renaissance is often labeled as a secular movement by modern scholars, this interpretation is largely due to the political motives of the Medici family who dominated Florence as the center of this artistic rebirth, on and off again throughout the period. On close examination, the philosophical and creative undercurrents of the movement …

Harlem And Abroad: Notes To An International 'Renaissance', Joshua I. Cohen

Publications and Research

Like other intractable figures of the Harlem Renaissance, the movement’s visual artists sometimes exceeded their expected parameters, and thus their anticipated representativeness of a locality. Their images, in other words, did not automatically disclose Harlem-bound or even US-bound concerns. Now familiar through continual reproduction in exhibition catalogues, scholarly monographs and literary compendia, certain artworks from the period – such as Archibald J. Motley’s Blues (1929; Figure 1) and Aaron Douglas’s Congo (c. 1928; Figure 2) – subverted any definition of the Harlem Renaissance that would hinge on a narrowly delimited urban geography or national imaginary. Motley, who painted ‘Blues’ during …

Sub Lege To Sub Gratia: An Iconographic Study Of Van Eyck’S Annunciation, Christopher J. Condon

Student Publications

When the Archangel Gabriel descended from heaven to inform the Virgin Mary of her status as God’s chosen vehicle for the birth of Jesus Christ, she was immediately filled with a sense of apprehension. Gabriel’s words, “...invenisti enim gratiam apud Deum [you have found favor with God],” reassured the Virgin that she would face no harm, and the scene of the Annunciation (what this moment has come to be called) has forever been immortalized in Christian belief as a watershed moment in the New Testament. While many Byzantine icons of the Medieval period sought to depict this snapshot in time …

Jasper Skulls And Memento Mori, Kathleen C. Paul

Wonders of Nature and Artifice

The jasper skulls in this Curiosity Cabinet sit on the scale atop the touch-ables table. Jasper, a type of impure silica usually a reddish color, is commonly carved for small sculptures, as we see in the skulls.

The reddish tones of both skulls match the overall tone of the cabinet nicely, as well as complimenting the rich medium blue of the walls. Thematically, skulls perfectly align with other objects in the cabinet.

A ubiquitous theme of curiosity cabinets in the 16th and 17th century is the inevitability of death. Symbols of this notion in art work are known as …

Romanticism And Religion: The Superb Lily, Alexis Marie Michelle Zilen

Wonders of Nature and Artifice

“The Superb Lily,” was donated by Geoff Jackson, class of 1991 and beloved benefactor of Gettysburg College, to Special Collections. This first edition piece was published in the twenty first page of the book, Temple of Flora. This text is considered the greatest and most famous florilegia of the twentieth century due to its accuracy of descriptions and vast size. It contained a total of thirty five floral prints. The publisher, Robert Thornton, produced numerous copies of this book in the same year, however, the exact number of copies is unknown. (excerpt)

Did One Veil Give Women A Better Life?, Mary C. Westermann

Student Publications

Unfortunately, a young woman in Renaissance Florence did not have many options for her future. A woman's family usually decided whether she would be able to get married or would have to enter the convent, but sometimes she was able to make this choice. In this paper, I look at the lives of wives and nuns to analyze how their lives differed in responsibilities and freedoms, but also to see how all women had similar restrictions and expectations placed upon them.

Willem Blaeu's 'Asia Noviter Delineata': Expressions Of Power Through Naval Might And Natural Knowledge In Dutch Mapmaking, Joshua W. Poorman

Student Publications

This paper situates Dutch mapmaker Willem Blaeu’s Asia noviter delineata—part of the Stuckenberg Map Collection in the Gettysburg College Special Collections—within the larger framework of Renaissance thought and a shifting colonial balance of power. The map’s pictorial marginalia expresses a Dutch quest for empirical knowledge that echoed contemporary cabinets of curiosities throughout early modern Europe. Similar to these cabinets, Blaeu’s map can be seen as a cartographic teatro mundi, used to propagate Dutch hegemony through both a robust naval presence and an expanding geographic and natural knowledge of the world.

Review/Report Of The Conference On The History Of The Book In Venice For The Sharp Newsletter (Society For The History Of Authorship, Reading And Publishing), Alice H.R.H. Beckwith

Art & Art History Faculty Publications

A review of a two day conference at the Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti on March 9-10 concerning the fifteenth-sixteenth century book industry in Renaissance Venice and Europe.

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 …

Review: Il Trionfo Della Miseria, Gli Alberghi Dei Poveri Di Genova, Palermo E Napoli, George Gorse

Pomona Faculty Publications and Research

Since Michel Foucault's seminal essays on the asylum, prison, and hospital in the Age of Reason, architectural historians have begun to examine these major public institutions in the life and pathology of the early modern city. This volume extends the disciplinary focus to public assistance and monumental housing for the poor, which was often closely related in ideology and building type to asylums, prisons, monasteries, and hospitals. Foucauldian intellectual history and urban history, with its concomitant interest in vernacular traditions, converge in this comparative study of Genoa, Palermo, and Naples during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Review: Naomi Miller, Renaissance Bologna: A Study In Architectural Form And Content, George Gorse

Pomona Faculty Publications and Research

Bologna is a uniquely beautiful Italian city with broad, arcaded streets, richly textured brick and sandstone facades, majestic piazzas, public sculpture, high towers, and a cuisine to take time over. However, the previous historiographic emphasis upon Florence, Rome, and Venice has diverted attention from more fully preserved medieval and Renaissance cities such as Bologna, where urbanism—the urban fabric—takes precedence over individual buildings and architects, and where the urban context defines the architectural monument. Bologna is the work of art. And for this reason, one welcomes the fine book on this major, yet understudied, urban center by Naomi Miller, a distinguished …

An Unpublished Description Of The Villa Doria In Genoa During Charles V'S Entry, 1533, George Gorse

Pomona Faculty Publications and Research

Recent scholarship on the Renaissance villa in Italy has emphasized its two major functions, as a pleasure retreat from the city and as a ceremonial entry into the city. This documentary note publishes a previously unknown Mantuan description of the Villa Doria in Genoa, addressed to Isabella d'Este, during the triumphal entry of Charles V into Genoa from March 28 to April 8, 1533. The document has interest for Renaissance scholars as the first description of the Villa Doria and of Perino del Vaga's decorations of 1529-33. It also shows the villa as part of a ceremonial sequence of entry …

The Villa Of Andrea Doria In Genoa: Architecture, Gardens, And Suburban Setting, George Gorse

Pomona Faculty Publications and Research

This paper reconsiders Andrea Doria's 16th-century villa in Genoa as an architectural and garden monument in relation to its original suburban setting.¹ The villa has thus far been discussed primarily as a decorative monument, with scholars focusing their attention upon the interior fresco and stucco decorations of Perino del Vaga and façade paintings by Perino, Beccafumi, and Pordenone.² However, these paintings have not been understood fully in terms of the architectural, garden, and suburban context of the villa, which serves as the focus of this study.