Pub Date : 2019-10-02DOI: 10.1080/01973762.2018.1553364
T. H. Sørensen
This article explores the relationship between center and periphery within Norwegian art at the turn of the century. It focuses on the Holmenkollen tourist hotel in Christiania (present-day Oslo) and the artists and architects involved in its construction. It shows how the relationship between the center/periphery is one of dynamic encounter and one where the relations of power are much more flexible than the traditional notion of the center dictating the terms. Moreover, it highlights how Norwegian artists through their work and writing reflected on their role as belonging to a peripheral art nation and illustrates how they found ways to make this peripheral identity a well of artistic creativity and the base for an artistic pride.
{"title":"Proudly Peripheral","authors":"T. H. Sørensen","doi":"10.1080/01973762.2018.1553364","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/01973762.2018.1553364","url":null,"abstract":"This article explores the relationship between center and periphery within Norwegian art at the turn of the century. It focuses on the Holmenkollen tourist hotel in Christiania (present-day Oslo) and the artists and architects involved in its construction. It shows how the relationship between the center/periphery is one of dynamic encounter and one where the relations of power are much more flexible than the traditional notion of the center dictating the terms. Moreover, it highlights how Norwegian artists through their work and writing reflected on their role as belonging to a peripheral art nation and illustrates how they found ways to make this peripheral identity a well of artistic creativity and the base for an artistic pride.","PeriodicalId":41894,"journal":{"name":"Visual Resources","volume":"35 1","pages":"237 - 265"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/01973762.2018.1553364","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42244858","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}
Pub Date : 2019-04-03DOI: 10.1080/01973762.2019.1553442
Virginia B. Spivey, Renée McGarry
This paper explores the potential for rigorous pedagogical scholarship to complement developments in digital art history (DAH). In addition to introducing ideas and methods that characterize scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) in higher education, we focus on two major themes: how digital tools and techniques can support robust scholarship of teaching and learning in art history (SoTL-AH) and ways that SoTL-AH can be used to evaluate and demonstrate the impact of DAH projects in the classroom and the public realm. Our goal is to encourage greater exchange between these two emerging fields that can together advance art historical study.
{"title":"Bridging the Research/Teaching Divide with DAH and SoTL-AH","authors":"Virginia B. Spivey, Renée McGarry","doi":"10.1080/01973762.2019.1553442","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/01973762.2019.1553442","url":null,"abstract":"This paper explores the potential for rigorous pedagogical scholarship to complement developments in digital art history (DAH). In addition to introducing ideas and methods that characterize scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) in higher education, we focus on two major themes: how digital tools and techniques can support robust scholarship of teaching and learning in art history (SoTL-AH) and ways that SoTL-AH can be used to evaluate and demonstrate the impact of DAH projects in the classroom and the public realm. Our goal is to encourage greater exchange between these two emerging fields that can together advance art historical study.","PeriodicalId":41894,"journal":{"name":"Visual Resources","volume":"35 1","pages":"34 - 51"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/01973762.2019.1553442","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44665522","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}
Pub Date : 2019-03-06DOI: 10.1080/01973762.2018.1553367
F. Vlachou
There is still no consensus on what (or when and where) the periphery is/has been. The centre–periphery opposition, criticised for its hierarchical and binary nature, has frequently been mapped onto the West–East divide, and scholars have questioned the applicability of the term from what it seems like a Eurocentric point of view. These notes reflect on the concept of periphery and its historiography, seeking to disentangle the periphery from its exclusive (and primarily geographical) association with the centre(s), using it instead to undercut the categories that have variously shaped and constrained the art historical discipline. It proposes the re-imagining of the study of the periphery as a fluid set of practices, with a strong association to fundamentally unequal power configurations, while assuming a wide range of methodological and theoretical positions.
{"title":"Notes from the Periphery: History and Methods","authors":"F. Vlachou","doi":"10.1080/01973762.2018.1553367","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/01973762.2018.1553367","url":null,"abstract":"There is still no consensus on what (or when and where) the periphery is/has been. The centre–periphery opposition, criticised for its hierarchical and binary nature, has frequently been mapped onto the West–East divide, and scholars have questioned the applicability of the term from what it seems like a Eurocentric point of view. These notes reflect on the concept of periphery and its historiography, seeking to disentangle the periphery from its exclusive (and primarily geographical) association with the centre(s), using it instead to undercut the categories that have variously shaped and constrained the art historical discipline. It proposes the re-imagining of the study of the periphery as a fluid set of practices, with a strong association to fundamentally unequal power configurations, while assuming a wide range of methodological and theoretical positions.","PeriodicalId":41894,"journal":{"name":"Visual Resources","volume":"35 1","pages":"193 - 199"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-03-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/01973762.2018.1553367","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43041715","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}
Pub Date : 2019-02-22DOI: 10.1080/01973762.2019.1556887
Murtha Baca, A. Helmreich, Melissa Gill
This introduction frames and situates this special issue of Visual Resources on the topic of digital art history, intentionally assembled five years after the journal’s previous digital art history issue with the goal of assessing the progress made in the field and encouraging more widespread adoption of digital methodologies. It sets forth the key themes of this issue: “thought pieces” on the state of digital art history and its value for scholarship and pedagogy; the significance of databases for art history and the intellectual complexities they entail; innovative computational analysis applied to material and social-historical questions in art history; and the possibilities engendered by online publishing. These foci are developed through and grounded in critically informed scholarly projects in digital art history. These projects also bring to light professional, cultural, social, linguistic, and even political issues encountered in practicing digital art history.
{"title":"Digital Art History","authors":"Murtha Baca, A. Helmreich, Melissa Gill","doi":"10.1080/01973762.2019.1556887","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/01973762.2019.1556887","url":null,"abstract":"This introduction frames and situates this special issue of Visual Resources on the topic of digital art history, intentionally assembled five years after the journal’s previous digital art history issue with the goal of assessing the progress made in the field and encouraging more widespread adoption of digital methodologies. It sets forth the key themes of this issue: “thought pieces” on the state of digital art history and its value for scholarship and pedagogy; the significance of databases for art history and the intellectual complexities they entail; innovative computational analysis applied to material and social-historical questions in art history; and the possibilities engendered by online publishing. These foci are developed through and grounded in critically informed scholarly projects in digital art history. These projects also bring to light professional, cultural, social, linguistic, and even political issues encountered in practicing digital art history.","PeriodicalId":41894,"journal":{"name":"Visual Resources","volume":"35 1","pages":"1 - 5"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-02-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/01973762.2019.1556887","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42667415","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}
Pub Date : 2019-02-22DOI: 10.1080/01973762.2019.1553446
Baillie Card, Martina Droth, T. Scutt, Sarah Victoria Turner
British Art Studies, a born-digital, open-access journal, co-published by the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art (PMC) and the Yale Center for British Art (YCBA), launched in November 2015. This article documents how and why British Art Studies was established and the ethos that has motivated the editorial team to always think “beyond the PDF” in creating a new digital publication for the field of art history. Drawing on case studies of articles and features published in the first seven issues of British Art Studies, the purpose of this article is to reflect on the creation and development of the journal alongside the broader critical and methodological questions that have guided and shaped our approach to publishing. Co-written by the current editorial and production team, this article explores how establishing and maintaining British Art Studies has enabled us and our authors to join the growing conversation about the intersection and cross-fertilization of art-historical research with digital tools and technologies.
{"title":"Beyond the PDF: Expanding Art History Digitally with British Art Studies","authors":"Baillie Card, Martina Droth, T. Scutt, Sarah Victoria Turner","doi":"10.1080/01973762.2019.1553446","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/01973762.2019.1553446","url":null,"abstract":"British Art Studies, a born-digital, open-access journal, co-published by the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art (PMC) and the Yale Center for British Art (YCBA), launched in November 2015. This article documents how and why British Art Studies was established and the ethos that has motivated the editorial team to always think “beyond the PDF” in creating a new digital publication for the field of art history. Drawing on case studies of articles and features published in the first seven issues of British Art Studies, the purpose of this article is to reflect on the creation and development of the journal alongside the broader critical and methodological questions that have guided and shaped our approach to publishing. Co-written by the current editorial and production team, this article explores how establishing and maintaining British Art Studies has enabled us and our authors to join the growing conversation about the intersection and cross-fertilization of art-historical research with digital tools and technologies.","PeriodicalId":41894,"journal":{"name":"Visual Resources","volume":"35 1","pages":"155 - 170"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-02-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/01973762.2019.1553446","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46497746","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}
Pub Date : 2019-02-18DOI: 10.1080/01973762.2019.1558994
C. Bruzelius, P. Vitolo
The Medieval Kingdom of Sicily Image Database documents historic buildings, monuments, and their decoration in South Italy, a geographic area ravaged by war, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, as well as the depredations of modern restoration and rampant urban growth. Our website and app are intended to help scholars, travelers, and local populations understand the appearance of historic monuments prior to modern change: their position in the landscape, their rich furnishings (tombs, altars, pulpits, painted ceilings, mosaics, altarpieces), and their role as statements of dynastic authority.
{"title":"The Medieval Kingdom of Sicily Image Database","authors":"C. Bruzelius, P. Vitolo","doi":"10.1080/01973762.2019.1558994","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/01973762.2019.1558994","url":null,"abstract":"The Medieval Kingdom of Sicily Image Database documents historic buildings, monuments, and their decoration in South Italy, a geographic area ravaged by war, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, as well as the depredations of modern restoration and rampant urban growth. Our website and app are intended to help scholars, travelers, and local populations understand the appearance of historic monuments prior to modern change: their position in the landscape, their rich furnishings (tombs, altars, pulpits, painted ceilings, mosaics, altarpieces), and their role as statements of dynastic authority.","PeriodicalId":41894,"journal":{"name":"Visual Resources","volume":"35 1","pages":"74 - 87"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-02-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/01973762.2019.1558994","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44381519","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}
Pub Date : 2019-02-18DOI: 10.1080/01973762.2019.1553651
P. Jaskot
Can we have a critical art history using digital methods? To answer this question, we need to ask what are the critical questions in art history that demand and are best suited to specific digital methods? This article argues that asking a critical question involves taking up the long art-historical tradition of the social history of art. Social art history is not satisfied with a social context for art, but rather reverses this equation by arguing that an analysis of art, artist, and audience must tell us something structurally about society. It is these kinds of questions that critically engage in broader art-historical debates. When questions such as these rely on large bodies of evidence – which they often do if “society” is their focus of study – then the scale of the project is, in today’s context, best suited for digital methods. In sum, digital art history lets us address the tradition of the social history of art in new ways. The following essay seeks to advance a nuanced triangulation between our art-historical topics of study, our methodological debates, and computational analysis. In specific terms, exploring alternative subjects of art history as well as the particular analytical methods of social art history opens up the debates in the discipline to a more critical intervention with digital methods.
{"title":"Digital Art History as the Social History of Art: Towards the Disciplinary Relevance of Digital Methods","authors":"P. Jaskot","doi":"10.1080/01973762.2019.1553651","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/01973762.2019.1553651","url":null,"abstract":"Can we have a critical art history using digital methods? To answer this question, we need to ask what are the critical questions in art history that demand and are best suited to specific digital methods? This article argues that asking a critical question involves taking up the long art-historical tradition of the social history of art. Social art history is not satisfied with a social context for art, but rather reverses this equation by arguing that an analysis of art, artist, and audience must tell us something structurally about society. It is these kinds of questions that critically engage in broader art-historical debates. When questions such as these rely on large bodies of evidence – which they often do if “society” is their focus of study – then the scale of the project is, in today’s context, best suited for digital methods. In sum, digital art history lets us address the tradition of the social history of art in new ways. The following essay seeks to advance a nuanced triangulation between our art-historical topics of study, our methodological debates, and computational analysis. In specific terms, exploring alternative subjects of art history as well as the particular analytical methods of social art history opens up the debates in the discipline to a more critical intervention with digital methods.","PeriodicalId":41894,"journal":{"name":"Visual Resources","volume":"35 1","pages":"21 - 33"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-02-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/01973762.2019.1553651","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46288791","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}
Pub Date : 2019-02-13DOI: 10.1080/01973762.2019.1553447
Alan Crookham, Stuart E. Dunn
The archival resources digitally available to scholars have been transforming rapidly in the past few years, an evolution in evidence in museums and galleries as well as in the wider field of art history. This change was, at first, operational: as the use of the Internet becamemore widespread from the late 1990s onwards, museums, libraries and archives started to place their catalogues online. Then, in the first decade of the twenty-first century, projects were developed to digitise selected items from library and archive collections. Such projects enabled researchers to gain remote access to flat images of archival material, and the scope of these digitisation projects has only increased in recent years, with more images being added to websites across the world; attention is now turning to the examination and extraction of the data contained in those flat images. In 2014 the National Gallery Research Centre acquired the archive of the art dealers Thomas Agnew & Sons (Agnew’s). This was a significant acquisition: the firm has an illustrious history dating back to 1817, and has dealt in some major works of art, such as Diego Velazquez’s Rokeby Venus (London National Gallery) and Portrait of Philip IV (New York, Frick Collection), John Constable’s Salisbury Cathedral (Tate Britain) and J.M.W Turner’s Helvoetsluys (Tokyo Art Museum). Agnew’s archives, which date from the 1850s, represent one of the most comprehensive collection of an art dealership’s business records, containing stock books, day books, photographic records and correspondence as well as other types of miscellaneous records such as, for instance, comprehensive lists of works shipped to the United States from London. The acquisition of the Agnew’s Archive enhanced the existing rich holdings of the Research Centre in the field of the history of collecting. The Gallery’s library contains over 80,000 printed volumes, including a particularly excellent holding of books relating to private collections. Similarly, the archive not only comprises the Gallery’s institutional records but also numerous private collections, including the papers of Francis Haskell (1928–2000) and Nicholas Penny relating to the history of collecting. The Agnew’s Archive was catalogued between 2014 and 2016 and the resulting finding aid was published online in April 2016. At the same time the Gallery appointed two doctoral students, Alison Clarke and Barbara Pezzini, to undertake research in the archive under the Arts and Humanities Research Council’s Collaborative Doctoral Partnership scheme. Both these initiatives were intended to raise the profile of the archive and once underway, the Research Centre started to consider how it could
{"title":"Reframing Art: Opening Up Art Dealers’ Archives to Multi-disciplinary Research","authors":"Alan Crookham, Stuart E. Dunn","doi":"10.1080/01973762.2019.1553447","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/01973762.2019.1553447","url":null,"abstract":"The archival resources digitally available to scholars have been transforming rapidly in the past few years, an evolution in evidence in museums and galleries as well as in the wider field of art history. This change was, at first, operational: as the use of the Internet becamemore widespread from the late 1990s onwards, museums, libraries and archives started to place their catalogues online. Then, in the first decade of the twenty-first century, projects were developed to digitise selected items from library and archive collections. Such projects enabled researchers to gain remote access to flat images of archival material, and the scope of these digitisation projects has only increased in recent years, with more images being added to websites across the world; attention is now turning to the examination and extraction of the data contained in those flat images. In 2014 the National Gallery Research Centre acquired the archive of the art dealers Thomas Agnew & Sons (Agnew’s). This was a significant acquisition: the firm has an illustrious history dating back to 1817, and has dealt in some major works of art, such as Diego Velazquez’s Rokeby Venus (London National Gallery) and Portrait of Philip IV (New York, Frick Collection), John Constable’s Salisbury Cathedral (Tate Britain) and J.M.W Turner’s Helvoetsluys (Tokyo Art Museum). Agnew’s archives, which date from the 1850s, represent one of the most comprehensive collection of an art dealership’s business records, containing stock books, day books, photographic records and correspondence as well as other types of miscellaneous records such as, for instance, comprehensive lists of works shipped to the United States from London. The acquisition of the Agnew’s Archive enhanced the existing rich holdings of the Research Centre in the field of the history of collecting. The Gallery’s library contains over 80,000 printed volumes, including a particularly excellent holding of books relating to private collections. Similarly, the archive not only comprises the Gallery’s institutional records but also numerous private collections, including the papers of Francis Haskell (1928–2000) and Nicholas Penny relating to the history of collecting. The Agnew’s Archive was catalogued between 2014 and 2016 and the resulting finding aid was published online in April 2016. At the same time the Gallery appointed two doctoral students, Alison Clarke and Barbara Pezzini, to undertake research in the archive under the Arts and Humanities Research Council’s Collaborative Doctoral Partnership scheme. Both these initiatives were intended to raise the profile of the archive and once underway, the Research Centre started to consider how it could","PeriodicalId":41894,"journal":{"name":"Visual Resources","volume":"35 1","pages":"180 - 183"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-02-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/01973762.2019.1553447","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47586845","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}
Pub Date : 2019-02-12DOI: 10.1080/01973762.2019.1556886
M. Ellis, C. R. Johnson
The feasibility of the application of image/signal processing for measuring, marking, matching, and sorting vast quantities of data derived from materials typically found in artworks is presented through four case studies. Different patterns produced by canvas weave structures, surface textures of historic photographic papers, chain line intervals in Rembrandt’s printing papers, and watermark variations have been subjected to different modes of computational analysis. The art-historical implications that result from computer-generated algorithms – including dating, attribution, authenticity, and workshop practices – can be considered as “computational connoisseurship.” The case studies discussed point to future areas for research. Finally, because of the need for statistically meaningful datasets of images, a practical means of recording internal paper structure is introduced.
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