which the critic advises the painter to depict Justice with an eye in the back of the head as well as one in the front. B. Fiera, De ivsticia pingenda: On the Painting of Justice; A Dialogue between Mantegna and Momus, trans. J. Wardrop (London, 1957), 30. J. Resnik and D. E. Curtis, Representing Justice: Invention, Controversy, and Rights in CityStates and Democratic Courtrooms (New Haven, CT, 2011), 93. The word “art,” like the word “craft,” or the word Kunst, has a shadowy side that indicates guile. Hence the word “artless,” which means free from deceit. While the primary function of a work of art may be to show, it can do so by coy means. The work of art may contain passages that dart away from the purpose of revealing, indicating by devices such as curtains, pouches, or folds, that there is substance within, though obscured from view. It is for the purpose of drawing out these tuckedaway messages that the work of art invites interpretation of a particular sort. Hermeneutics is the work of Hermes, the mediator between the divine and human worlds. But in the Netherlands, in the mid-sixteenth-century, specifically, in 1561, a different quasi-god was introduced as the go-between traversing the two realms, one who could also be employed as a guide in the reception of art. This was Momus, the god of criticism, expelled from Olympus for too severely judging the divine. The story of Momus acting as arbiter among the gods is told in Aesop’s Fables and Lucian’s Hermotimus (both of which were printed in Latin translations in northern Europe in the 1520s), and in Leon Battista Alberti’s political satire Momus, subtitled The Prince, which was composed in 1492, dedicated to Sigismondo Malatesta, banned, then published in 1520. Each of these texts tells how, when Zeus created the world, a contest was held to see which immortal could make the best gift for Earth. Momus found fault with each deity’s craft. Of Poseidon’s bull, he judged that the eyes should be atop the horns to enable better sight when charging forth; Athena’s house should have been mounted on wheels to make its location mobile in the event of having to flee bad neighbors; of Hephaestus’s invention, a man, Momus quipped that, while almost perfect, the construction could have been improved if a window
{"title":"Maerten van Heemskerck’s Momus and the moment of critique","authors":"Shira Brisman","doi":"10.1086/710057","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/710057","url":null,"abstract":"which the critic advises the painter to depict Justice with an eye in the back of the head as well as one in the front. B. Fiera, De ivsticia pingenda: On the Painting of Justice; A Dialogue between Mantegna and Momus, trans. J. Wardrop (London, 1957), 30. J. Resnik and D. E. Curtis, Representing Justice: Invention, Controversy, and Rights in CityStates and Democratic Courtrooms (New Haven, CT, 2011), 93. The word “art,” like the word “craft,” or the word Kunst, has a shadowy side that indicates guile. Hence the word “artless,” which means free from deceit. While the primary function of a work of art may be to show, it can do so by coy means. The work of art may contain passages that dart away from the purpose of revealing, indicating by devices such as curtains, pouches, or folds, that there is substance within, though obscured from view. It is for the purpose of drawing out these tuckedaway messages that the work of art invites interpretation of a particular sort. Hermeneutics is the work of Hermes, the mediator between the divine and human worlds. But in the Netherlands, in the mid-sixteenth-century, specifically, in 1561, a different quasi-god was introduced as the go-between traversing the two realms, one who could also be employed as a guide in the reception of art. This was Momus, the god of criticism, expelled from Olympus for too severely judging the divine. The story of Momus acting as arbiter among the gods is told in Aesop’s Fables and Lucian’s Hermotimus (both of which were printed in Latin translations in northern Europe in the 1520s), and in Leon Battista Alberti’s political satire Momus, subtitled The Prince, which was composed in 1492, dedicated to Sigismondo Malatesta, banned, then published in 1520. Each of these texts tells how, when Zeus created the world, a contest was held to see which immortal could make the best gift for Earth. Momus found fault with each deity’s craft. Of Poseidon’s bull, he judged that the eyes should be atop the horns to enable better sight when charging forth; Athena’s house should have been mounted on wheels to make its location mobile in the event of having to flee bad neighbors; of Hephaestus’s invention, a man, Momus quipped that, while almost perfect, the construction could have been improved if a window","PeriodicalId":39613,"journal":{"name":"Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics","volume":"73-74 1","pages":"23 - 40"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1086/710057","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49544469","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Books received November 2019–September 2020","authors":"","doi":"10.1086/711841","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/711841","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":39613,"journal":{"name":"Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics","volume":"73-74 1","pages":"357 - 358"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1086/711841","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42237866","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Two paintings, by Giandomenico Tiepolo and Edgar Degas, mark points in a story line about the tension between human figures and the artworks that try to contain them, a story about the heightening and relaxation of that tension over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Any depiction of human figures subordinates, to some degree, the depicted bodies to the “body” of the artwork—its composition. It will be argued here that this tension between body and composition is redoubled— reproduced as subject matter, as it were—when the picture depicts dance and dancers. For a dance, even before it is represented in a picture, very often already involves a rivalry between individual stylized moving bodies and coordinated assemblages of those bodies. In the contest between dancing body and overall staged tableau, the dice are loaded, as it were, because the dancer, even if playing a role, is still a real person with a real center of gravity who may well resist being reduced to an element of a pattern. The transformation of body into artwork is always incomplete. The dancer never quite disappears into his role, as a painter’s model does. Dance thus proposes a counteraesthetic to the art of painting, or at least acts as a drag on some powerful concepts of painting that stress composition or planar patterning above everything: a challenge staved off by the two very sovereign paintings to be discussed, the one knowing, the other doubting. Between the two pictures, as if in a fable, appears a sculptor who set down his chisel, for a time, and took up painting, an art form he little understood, in hopes of courting the muse of dance: this was Antonio Canova. The dancer, he hoped, held the key to a recentering of art on the mobile, self-possessed body—no, more than that: a reduction or leading-back of art to a simple placement, a placing-there, of bodies. The sculptor’s experiments around 1800 expose the plot that embraces the two paintings.
{"title":"The dancer in and out of character","authors":"Christopher S. Wood","doi":"10.1086/710127","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/710127","url":null,"abstract":"Two paintings, by Giandomenico Tiepolo and Edgar Degas, mark points in a story line about the tension between human figures and the artworks that try to contain them, a story about the heightening and relaxation of that tension over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Any depiction of human figures subordinates, to some degree, the depicted bodies to the “body” of the artwork—its composition. It will be argued here that this tension between body and composition is redoubled— reproduced as subject matter, as it were—when the picture depicts dance and dancers. For a dance, even before it is represented in a picture, very often already involves a rivalry between individual stylized moving bodies and coordinated assemblages of those bodies. In the contest between dancing body and overall staged tableau, the dice are loaded, as it were, because the dancer, even if playing a role, is still a real person with a real center of gravity who may well resist being reduced to an element of a pattern. The transformation of body into artwork is always incomplete. The dancer never quite disappears into his role, as a painter’s model does. Dance thus proposes a counteraesthetic to the art of painting, or at least acts as a drag on some powerful concepts of painting that stress composition or planar patterning above everything: a challenge staved off by the two very sovereign paintings to be discussed, the one knowing, the other doubting. Between the two pictures, as if in a fable, appears a sculptor who set down his chisel, for a time, and took up painting, an art form he little understood, in hopes of courting the muse of dance: this was Antonio Canova. The dancer, he hoped, held the key to a recentering of art on the mobile, self-possessed body—no, more than that: a reduction or leading-back of art to a simple placement, a placing-there, of bodies. The sculptor’s experiments around 1800 expose the plot that embraces the two paintings.","PeriodicalId":39613,"journal":{"name":"Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics","volume":"73-74 1","pages":"124 - 139"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1086/710127","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41552319","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The figure acting outside the representational plane— that is, outside the field defined by three noncollinear points—becomes a body. The notion of the parade as a means of establishing “the preliminaries of a history and theory of the figure” that manifests “outside the scene of representation,” therefore, prompts us to think about the changing relationship between the plane geometry of representation—the paper, wall, canvas—and the solid yet unruly geometry of the human body and the space it constructs around itself. Methodologically, the ramifications of this shift can be investigated by assessing the linkage between early modern explorations in anthropometry, which this essay will discuss in relation to the work of Albrecht Dürer, and the concurrent innovation of garment pattern construction. Emerging with the art of tailoring, the pattern drawing, which can be classified as a type of geometric diagram, linked fundamentally ambiguous properties: as a genre of drawing, it presents the graphic visualization of the measured and deconstructed form of the human body; as an iconological type, it embodies the scaled and decomposed abstraction of a silhouette designed to fashion that body into a stylized form. Arresting the process of an envisioned design transformation in the form of a technical drawing, the pattern drawing folds past and future into one.
{"title":"Albrecht Dürer and the tailoring of the human form","authors":"C. Hille","doi":"10.1086/711618","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/711618","url":null,"abstract":"The figure acting outside the representational plane— that is, outside the field defined by three noncollinear points—becomes a body. The notion of the parade as a means of establishing “the preliminaries of a history and theory of the figure” that manifests “outside the scene of representation,” therefore, prompts us to think about the changing relationship between the plane geometry of representation—the paper, wall, canvas—and the solid yet unruly geometry of the human body and the space it constructs around itself. Methodologically, the ramifications of this shift can be investigated by assessing the linkage between early modern explorations in anthropometry, which this essay will discuss in relation to the work of Albrecht Dürer, and the concurrent innovation of garment pattern construction. Emerging with the art of tailoring, the pattern drawing, which can be classified as a type of geometric diagram, linked fundamentally ambiguous properties: as a genre of drawing, it presents the graphic visualization of the measured and deconstructed form of the human body; as an iconological type, it embodies the scaled and decomposed abstraction of a silhouette designed to fashion that body into a stylized form. Arresting the process of an envisioned design transformation in the form of a technical drawing, the pattern drawing folds past and future into one.","PeriodicalId":39613,"journal":{"name":"Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics","volume":"73-74 1","pages":"10 - 22"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1086/711618","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47248694","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Taking a cue from Cy Twombly, perhaps his truest source of inspiration, Jean-Michel Basquiat left the relative street-comfort of the graffiti-parade to embark on an even more daring personal journey. But what could the link be between Basquiat’s early practice of a street-bound theatricality and Twombly’s immersion into, and transposition of, classical echoes as content within his pictures—his citing not of visual icons, prevalently, but of verbal ones? Twombly’s words themselves, or his sentences, or the fragments thereof (his verbal ruins) are extracted from their original context and quasi-sacrificially offered either in isolation or in new company, so that their reappearing could elicit the sense of something paradoxically unprecedented. The citation is meant to counter the wear of language, of history, through the ravages of time, but also, emphatically, to draw (poetic, and on occasion perhaps even polemical) attention to this fatal crumbling of images and words, embedded in what may be left of the memory, and the records, of (Western, literate) “civilization.” The early insertion of xeroxes of his own sketches through collage allowed Basquiat to juxtapose iconic appropriation and transposition—à la Andy Warhol, but also with a touch of Old World objet-trouvé sensibility (once more, not unrelated to Twombly’s own)—with a sort of dramatic in-your-face display of language-asicon. Warhol, on the other hand, for all his “philosophy,” had affected—like John Cage, despite his meta-musical ramblings—an insistent predilection for silence. It is as if language itself became for Basquiat a spectacle of the imaginary, each word, each fragment of a sentence, a scene in a kaleidoscopic display of rhetorical content that would pile up as word-images in a discourse
{"title":"Postscriptum","authors":"Francesco Pellizzi","doi":"10.1086/711855","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/711855","url":null,"abstract":"Taking a cue from Cy Twombly, perhaps his truest source of inspiration, Jean-Michel Basquiat left the relative street-comfort of the graffiti-parade to embark on an even more daring personal journey. But what could the link be between Basquiat’s early practice of a street-bound theatricality and Twombly’s immersion into, and transposition of, classical echoes as content within his pictures—his citing not of visual icons, prevalently, but of verbal ones? Twombly’s words themselves, or his sentences, or the fragments thereof (his verbal ruins) are extracted from their original context and quasi-sacrificially offered either in isolation or in new company, so that their reappearing could elicit the sense of something paradoxically unprecedented. The citation is meant to counter the wear of language, of history, through the ravages of time, but also, emphatically, to draw (poetic, and on occasion perhaps even polemical) attention to this fatal crumbling of images and words, embedded in what may be left of the memory, and the records, of (Western, literate) “civilization.” The early insertion of xeroxes of his own sketches through collage allowed Basquiat to juxtapose iconic appropriation and transposition—à la Andy Warhol, but also with a touch of Old World objet-trouvé sensibility (once more, not unrelated to Twombly’s own)—with a sort of dramatic in-your-face display of language-asicon. Warhol, on the other hand, for all his “philosophy,” had affected—like John Cage, despite his meta-musical ramblings—an insistent predilection for silence. It is as if language itself became for Basquiat a spectacle of the imaginary, each word, each fragment of a sentence, a scene in a kaleidoscopic display of rhetorical content that would pile up as word-images in a discourse","PeriodicalId":39613,"journal":{"name":"Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics","volume":"73-74 1","pages":"304 - 306"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1086/711855","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46278889","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
There aren’t many corners of the past that remain unexplored. The history of the corner is one of them. To the best of my knowledge, no one has yet probed this chapter in the history of the built environment. Until recently, I didn’t think I would. Moving to New York City changed that. New York is perhaps the quintessential “city of corners.” In this essay, I’d like to offer some observations from the perspective of a cultural historian. Specifically, two avenues of inquiry intersect in this piece: it explores the history of the corner as a spatial object shaped by human design, but it also probes the agency of corners—that is, how they have shaped the ways in which people use and imagine the built environment. Two objections may be raised against my approach. For one thing, this piece mixes sources that some might argue should not be mixed: historical and literary texts, artistic and scholarly material, and personal and “objective” observations. For another, the piece doesn’t proceed in a strictly chronological fashion. In fact, not all periods of history will be treated with the same degree of detail: I will elaborate on some and only touch on others. The pragmatic reason is that this piece is merely an essay outlining the contours of a topic not yet studied. But perhaps a slightly unconventional approach might also suit an object that is, by definition, not straight, but bent. After all, would anyone really argue that a unifying thread or teleology is waiting to be uncovered in the history of the corner? There may be certain patterns or tendencies in this history, and I will try to elaborate on some of these constellations. Still, this essay remains preliminary and, to some extent, experimental—an experiment to determine whether it is possible to extract history from the corner of conventional disciplinary narratives. It is the historian’s inclination, but sometimes also his limitation, to look for avenues and “turning points” in the tangle that is the past—that is, to look for stories that can be mapped onto a grid of chronological progression
{"title":"Toward a history of the corner","authors":"Daniel Jütte","doi":"10.1086/708675","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/708675","url":null,"abstract":"There aren’t many corners of the past that remain unexplored. The history of the corner is one of them. To the best of my knowledge, no one has yet probed this chapter in the history of the built environment. Until recently, I didn’t think I would. Moving to New York City changed that. New York is perhaps the quintessential “city of corners.” In this essay, I’d like to offer some observations from the perspective of a cultural historian. Specifically, two avenues of inquiry intersect in this piece: it explores the history of the corner as a spatial object shaped by human design, but it also probes the agency of corners—that is, how they have shaped the ways in which people use and imagine the built environment. Two objections may be raised against my approach. For one thing, this piece mixes sources that some might argue should not be mixed: historical and literary texts, artistic and scholarly material, and personal and “objective” observations. For another, the piece doesn’t proceed in a strictly chronological fashion. In fact, not all periods of history will be treated with the same degree of detail: I will elaborate on some and only touch on others. The pragmatic reason is that this piece is merely an essay outlining the contours of a topic not yet studied. But perhaps a slightly unconventional approach might also suit an object that is, by definition, not straight, but bent. After all, would anyone really argue that a unifying thread or teleology is waiting to be uncovered in the history of the corner? There may be certain patterns or tendencies in this history, and I will try to elaborate on some of these constellations. Still, this essay remains preliminary and, to some extent, experimental—an experiment to determine whether it is possible to extract history from the corner of conventional disciplinary narratives. It is the historian’s inclination, but sometimes also his limitation, to look for avenues and “turning points” in the tangle that is the past—that is, to look for stories that can be mapped onto a grid of chronological progression","PeriodicalId":39613,"journal":{"name":"Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics","volume":"73-74 1","pages":"340 - 356"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1086/708675","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47768062","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The atmosphere of Torre di Venere remains unpleasant in the memory. From the first moment the air of the place made us uneasy, we felt irritable, on edge; then at the end came the shocking business of Cipolla, that dreadful being who seemed to incorporate, in so fateful and so humanly impressive a way, all the peculiar evilness of the situation as a whole. Looking back, we had the feeling that the horrible end of the affair had been preordained and lay in the nature of things; that the children had to be present at it was an added impropriety, due to the false colors in which the weird creature presented himself. Luckily for them, they did not know where the comedy left off and the tragedy began; and we let them remain in their happy belief that the whole thing had been a play up till the end.
{"title":"Is Fascist realism a magic realism?","authors":"Romy Golan","doi":"10.1086/710830","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/710830","url":null,"abstract":"The atmosphere of Torre di Venere remains unpleasant in the memory. From the first moment the air of the place made us uneasy, we felt irritable, on edge; then at the end came the shocking business of Cipolla, that dreadful being who seemed to incorporate, in so fateful and so humanly impressive a way, all the peculiar evilness of the situation as a whole. Looking back, we had the feeling that the horrible end of the affair had been preordained and lay in the nature of things; that the children had to be present at it was an added impropriety, due to the false colors in which the weird creature presented himself. Luckily for them, they did not know where the comedy left off and the tragedy began; and we let them remain in their happy belief that the whole thing had been a play up till the end.","PeriodicalId":39613,"journal":{"name":"Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics","volume":"73-74 1","pages":"221 - 237"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1086/710830","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45032313","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
In the visual culture of empire between 1770 and 1870 a new species of image emerged that showed the figure in states of extraordinary metamorphosis. These “dancing images” showed the figure in a state of metamorphosis not out of a newly accomplished representational approach to solving the persistent problem in art of how to translate the movements of a three-dimensional body to a two-dimensional picture plane but rather because these images broke apart in the attempt at doing so. The edges of the figure’s fragmented pieces shivered with the passing of embodied energies that the dancing image had only partially succeeded in arresting. The history of such images is not a history of the picturesque; it is a history of that which cannot be pictured—a history, as it were, of the picture-non-esque, that which cannot be arrested by “the tight weave of signifiers” composing the aesthetic text. Convulsed in motion, these dancing images work as new historiographical operators revealing the interlocking histories of the body and of art in the era of British colonial expansion. The period under consideration begins with the dissemination of artists, military draftsmen, networks of native artists, colonial patronage systems, and image-making apparatuses (printing presses, photographic equipment) across the “imperial meridian” and concludes with the onset of chronophotography and film, which took over as the most progressive ontological medium for exploring the problem of representing movement in images post1870. The history of art during this period must, then, be written not as the progress and development of the picturesque style but rather as a fraught history of the attempts to represent the energetic movement of bodies in antagonism with each other and with the world. Such a history indicates that there is a missing episode in this story between the spectacular, multimedia art of the
{"title":"The dancing image in India, England, and the Caribbean, 1770–1870","authors":"J. Cooper","doi":"10.1086/711595","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/711595","url":null,"abstract":"In the visual culture of empire between 1770 and 1870 a new species of image emerged that showed the figure in states of extraordinary metamorphosis. These “dancing images” showed the figure in a state of metamorphosis not out of a newly accomplished representational approach to solving the persistent problem in art of how to translate the movements of a three-dimensional body to a two-dimensional picture plane but rather because these images broke apart in the attempt at doing so. The edges of the figure’s fragmented pieces shivered with the passing of embodied energies that the dancing image had only partially succeeded in arresting. The history of such images is not a history of the picturesque; it is a history of that which cannot be pictured—a history, as it were, of the picture-non-esque, that which cannot be arrested by “the tight weave of signifiers” composing the aesthetic text. Convulsed in motion, these dancing images work as new historiographical operators revealing the interlocking histories of the body and of art in the era of British colonial expansion. The period under consideration begins with the dissemination of artists, military draftsmen, networks of native artists, colonial patronage systems, and image-making apparatuses (printing presses, photographic equipment) across the “imperial meridian” and concludes with the onset of chronophotography and film, which took over as the most progressive ontological medium for exploring the problem of representing movement in images post1870. The history of art during this period must, then, be written not as the progress and development of the picturesque style but rather as a fraught history of the attempts to represent the energetic movement of bodies in antagonism with each other and with the world. Such a history indicates that there is a missing episode in this story between the spectacular, multimedia art of the","PeriodicalId":39613,"journal":{"name":"Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics","volume":"73-74 1","pages":"94 - 110"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1086/711595","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41377448","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Christopher Wren believed in the timelessness of the classical Orders of architecture. In direct reaction to the buildings of Paris and Versailles, where he observed in 1665 that “works of Filgrand, and little Knacks are in great Vogue,” he argued that the Orders should not be subject to overembellishment and what he saw as the whims of fashion. “Architecture aims at Eternity,” was the way he put it at the opening of the first of his “Tracts” on architecture, continuing that “therefore the only Thing uncapable of Modes and Fashions in its Principals” are “the Orders.” But this understanding did not stop him from adding decoration that helped represent a building’s particular function and meaning. In so doing, he drew on symbolism common in two emblematic traditions, also with their origins in antiquity, namely the heraldic and the alchemical. Heraldry emphasizes continuity and lineage, and alchemy transformation and rebirth, all potent themes following a period of civil upheavals. Although Wren’s use of heraldry is a neglected aspect of his work, it is frequently present and sometimes dominant. It can be seen as a key way in which he symbolized his belief in the enduring qualities of British monarchy, especially its restorative powers following the king’s troubled relationship with the City of London during the traumas of the civil war and Commonwealth. The opposition of the City to the Stuart Crown during the civil war, when the corporate body sided with the Roundheads, had all too recently been a major factor in the monarch’s downfall. The City remained fiercely jealous of its longstanding privileges in relation to the Crown. Wren was a staunch believer in the importance of monarchy as an institution, as might be expected of someone occupying the office of Royal Surveyor. His unbuilt mausoleum for Charles I, proposed for Windsor
{"title":"“London’s standard”","authors":"Vaughan Hart","doi":"10.1086/708601","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/708601","url":null,"abstract":"Christopher Wren believed in the timelessness of the classical Orders of architecture. In direct reaction to the buildings of Paris and Versailles, where he observed in 1665 that “works of Filgrand, and little Knacks are in great Vogue,” he argued that the Orders should not be subject to overembellishment and what he saw as the whims of fashion. “Architecture aims at Eternity,” was the way he put it at the opening of the first of his “Tracts” on architecture, continuing that “therefore the only Thing uncapable of Modes and Fashions in its Principals” are “the Orders.” But this understanding did not stop him from adding decoration that helped represent a building’s particular function and meaning. In so doing, he drew on symbolism common in two emblematic traditions, also with their origins in antiquity, namely the heraldic and the alchemical. Heraldry emphasizes continuity and lineage, and alchemy transformation and rebirth, all potent themes following a period of civil upheavals. Although Wren’s use of heraldry is a neglected aspect of his work, it is frequently present and sometimes dominant. It can be seen as a key way in which he symbolized his belief in the enduring qualities of British monarchy, especially its restorative powers following the king’s troubled relationship with the City of London during the traumas of the civil war and Commonwealth. The opposition of the City to the Stuart Crown during the civil war, when the corporate body sided with the Roundheads, had all too recently been a major factor in the monarch’s downfall. The City remained fiercely jealous of its longstanding privileges in relation to the Crown. Wren was a staunch believer in the importance of monarchy as an institution, as might be expected of someone occupying the office of Royal Surveyor. His unbuilt mausoleum for Charles I, proposed for Windsor","PeriodicalId":39613,"journal":{"name":"Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics","volume":"73-74 1","pages":"325 - 339"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1086/708601","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45243517","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Robert M. Laughlin, in memoriam","authors":"","doi":"10.1086/711854","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/711854","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":39613,"journal":{"name":"Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1086/711854","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47121610","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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