Other History of Art, Architecture, and Archaeology Commons^™

Living Memories: Rethinking Remembrance, Timothy Mulhall

Architecture Senior Theses

This thesis will interrogate conventional types and methods of memorialization, challenging the memorial as a complete product. Developing from inquiries into alternative acts of commemoration, this investigation will seek to conceive a memorial in the making. Memorials must be alive, changing, constantly developing as a result of interaction. The reliance on overly abstract, rhetorical conditions of design will become obsolete. The static condition of the image-friendly object will be replaced with a dynamism influenced by time and participation.

A New Approach To The Restoration Of Cimabue’S Santa Croce Crucifix, Isaac Messina

Renée Crown University Honors Thesis Projects - All

On November 4, 1966 floodwaters submerged Cimabue’s late thirteenth-century Santa Croce Crucifix in Florence and stripped off nearly half of its original paint. Soon regarded as a key symbol of the flood’s catastrophic effects on the city’s rich artistic legacy, the crucifix was carefully conserved, but no attempts were made to hide the extensive scars left by the disaster. Instead, lead conservators Umberto Baldini and Ornella Casazza adopted an abstract approach to filling the work’s loss that claimed to honor the flood while providing a seamless viewing experience for the contemporary audience. This thesis shows that their theory and practice …

Illuminating Exclusion: Constructions Of National Identity In The Washington National Cathedral's Stained Glass Windows, Maggie T. Gleason

Renée Crown University Honors Thesis Projects - All

The Washington National Cathedral in Washington, D.C. offers itself as a national monument and spiritual center for the American people. Thousands of tourists and worshipers visit the Cathedral every year to admire its Neo-Gothic style architecture, stained glass windows, hand-carved sculpture and the general splendor of the massive medieval-inspired structure. I argue that the imagery and iconography of this ornamentation presents American national identity as white and Christian, an ideal that is cultivated through the exclusion and domination of minority racial groups and alternative belief systems in the Cathedral’s decorative program, through the stained glass windows.

In order to shed …

The Intercultural Ancients: A Mock Exhibit Exploring The Cross-Cultural Influences In The Representation Of Women In Ancient South Asian And Ancient Mediterranean Art, Roshni Bhambhwani

Renée Crown University Honors Thesis Projects - All

This project is a mock-exhibit which explores the existence the crosscultural diffusion between the early people of the Mediterranean (from the Balkan Peninsula to the Syrian coast) and South Asia (from Afghanistan to Bhutan). The components of the project are an exhibition catalog and 3D exhibition design. Although there is substantial evidence of ancient contacts between the Aegean (Balkan Peninsula, Crete, Cyclades) and the Near East (Syria, South Turkey, Eastern Iraq, Western Iran) and South Asia and the Near East, there is little scholarship in the evidence-scarce topic of communication between the Aegean and South Asia. This exhibit broaches this …

Backwards Romanticism Or A Glimpse Of The Future? The Visual Language Of Reactionary Modernism In National Socialist Landscape Painting, Jennifer A. Gramer

Renée Crown University Honors Thesis Projects - All

In 1935, two years prior to the opening of the House of German Art in Munich, Adolf Hitler declared the following during a speech to the German people in Nuremberg:

“Art, precisely because it is the most direct and faithful emanation of the Volksgeist, constitutes the force that unconsciously models the mass of the people in the most active fashion, on condition that this art is a sincere reflection of the soul and temperament of a race and is not a deformation of it.”

Numerous scholars have noted the importance and necessity of art in the creation and molding …

Polish Influence On American Synagogue Architecture, Samuel D. Gruber

Religion - All Scholarship

Hundreds of thousands of Jews from Poland came to America after 1880. Many built synagogues with details recalling synagogues in their homeland. Immigrant artisans brought motifs and methods of Poland. Many of these synagogues were small, so the relationship to Polish art was on the inside in the painted and carved decoration. Established architects also had access to Polish synagogues as sources. With publication of the Jewish Encyclopedia (1901-06) images of Polish synagogues, such as the Warsaw’s Tlomackie Street Synagogue, became part of many Jewish libraries. More Polish influence came in the 1950s. Most architects were building modern synagogues, …

Determining Authorship Of The Virgin Of The Rocks: A Botanical Study, Christina J. Tripi

Renée Crown University Honors Thesis Projects - All

On April 25, 1483 Leonardo da Vinci and Evangelista and Ambrogio de’ Predis, signed a contract with the Confraternity of the Immaculate Conception in Milan. The artists were commissioned to complete a painting for the Confraternity’s chapel in the Church of San Francesco Grande. While there are two existing paintings associated with this contract--one version in the Louvre and one in the National Gallery--it remains a mystery which painting results from the commission.

Art historians generally agree that the Louvre version is entirely by the hand of Leonardo. Unfortunately, nothing is known of its history before the year 1625 when …

Landscaping Helen Frankenthaler, Morgan Ridler

Renée Crown University Honors Thesis Projects - All

There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterward you can remove all traces of reality. There’s no danger then, anyway, because the idea of the object will have left an indelible mark. It is what started the artist off, excited his ideas, and stirred up his emotions. Ideas and emotions will in the end be prisoners in his work. Whatever they do, they can’t escape from the picture. They form an integral part of it, even when their presence is no longer discernible. — Picasso1 Helen Frankenthaler is an Abstract Expressionist painter who seems to prove …

Survey Of Historic Jewish Monuments In Poland, Revised Edition, Samuel D. Gruber, Phyllis Myers

School of Architecture - All Scholarship

1995 report to the United States Commission for the Preservation of America's Heritage Abroad on historic Jewish sites in Poland. Includes information on the history of Judaism in Poland, as well as the history and current conditions of synagogues and cemeteries.

Survey Of Historic Jewish Monuments In The Czech Republic, Samuel D. Gruber, Phyllis Myers

School of Architecture - All Scholarship

1994 report to the United States Commission for the Preservation of America's Heritage Abroad on historic Jewish monuments in the Czech Republic. Includes information on the history of Judaism in Poland, as well as information on the history and conditions of synagogues, cemeteries, ghettoes, jewish quarters, and other sites related to Jewish heritage. There are also notes on Czech preservation laws and destroyed synagogues.

The Future Of Jewish Monuments, Samuel Gruber, Samuel D. Gruber

Religion - All Scholarship

Exhibition essay from first exhibition focused on the documentation, protection and preservation of Jewish monuments and historic sites. The exhibition opened in conjunction with the international conference "The Future of Jewish Monuments," organized by the Jewish Heritage Council of the World Monuments Fund. The exhibition focused on the needs of historic sites in Eastern Europe, North Africa, the united States and elsewhere, and made the case for international support.

Consistency In Community Identity: Pueblo Bonito, Chaco Canyon, New Mexico, Robert Haley

School of Architecture - All Scholarship

Haley specifically discusses the form of communities in Chaco Canyon, New Mexico that could be found during the first millenium AD.