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Papers by Robert Brennan
The Art Bulletin, 2023
“Arabesques” (arabeschi) took shape as a term and concept in sixteenth-century Italy to describe ... more “Arabesques” (arabeschi) took shape as a term and concept in sixteenth-century Italy to describe motifs deriving from Islamic art. The formation of the concept reflects a complex interplay between art making and art theory, which played out differently across different media. In metalwork, the arabesque was conceptualized in tandem with conscious projects of imperialist appropriation, whereas in needlework, it furnished a theoretical basis for a highly conflicted affirmation of female artists. In the long term, these countervailing developments laid the groundwork for increasingly racialized identifications between the arabesque and the grotesque.
The Network of Cassinese Arts in Renaissance Italy, 2021
Ghiberti Teorico: Natura, arte, coscienza storica nel Quattrocento, eds. Fabian Jonietz, Wolf-Dietrich Löhr, Alessandro Nova, 2019
RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics, 2016
Renaissance Metapainting, eds. Péter Bokody and Alexander Nagel, 2020
Books by Robert Brennan
This book addresses a phenomenon that pervades the field of art history: the fact that English ha... more This book addresses a phenomenon that pervades the field of art history: the fact that English has become our most prominent and widely adopted language. Art history employs language in a very particular way, one of its most basic aims being the verbal reconstruction of the visual past. The book seeks to shed light on the particular issues that English's rise to prominence poses for art history by investigating the history of the discipline itself: specifically, the extent to which the European tradition of art historical writing has always been shaped by the presence of dominant languages on the continent.
The central questions of the volume can thus be summarized as follows. What artistic, intellectual , and historical dynamics drove the pattern of linguistic ascendance and diffusion in the art historical writing of past centuries? How have the immediate, practical ends of writing in a common language had unintended, long-term consequences for the discipline? Were art historical concepts transformed or left behind with the onset of a new lingua franca, or did they often remain intact beneath a shifting veneer of new words?
Painting as a Modern Art in Early Renaissance Italy, 2019
Art historians have often looked back on the Italian Renaissance as a signal moment for the emerg... more Art historians have often looked back on the Italian Renaissance as a signal moment for the emergence of modern art. In doing so, they evaluate the modernity of the period in conscious hindsight: the Renaissance is modern insofar as some aspect of their own modernity can be seen to originate in it. Whatever the merits of this approach, it sheds little light on what it meant when Renaissance writers themselves called art modern. What is modern to us was not necessarily modern to them.
Painting as a Modern Art in Early Renaissance Italy reconstructs a historical concept of modern art on the basis of sources written between the 1390s and 1440s. The central point of reference in these sources was Giotto, the early fourteenth-century painter who, as one writer put it in 1442, “first modernized (modernizavit) ancient and mosaic figures.” The word “modern” was used in a wide variety of ways throughout this period, some quite polemical, others rather prosaic. To call art (ars) modern, however, was to invoke a stable, well-defined concept whose roots ran deep in late-medieval intellectual life. According to this concept, to make an art modern was to set it on a new foundation in science (scientia) and rationalize it accordingly.
As familiar as this formulation may sound in principle, each and every one of its key terms — art, modernity, science, rationality — meant something strikingly different in this period than it does in our time. The hallmark of modern art was not verisimilitude or expression or virtually any of the achievements that art historians associate with Giotto today, but rather the invention of techniques that aimed to imitate nature in its very manner of operation, aligning the concrete, step-by-step process of painting with the inner workings of nature itself. By reclaiming this concept and tracking its complex relation to early Renaissance concerns such as linear perspective and the canon of proportion, the book not only establishes a novel framework for the visual analysis of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Italian painting, but also unravels a fundamental master narrative of Western art history from within, clearing the way for renewed discussions of alternative modernities, including those that precede the story of modernism as we know it.
Book Reviews by Robert Brennan
Annali di architettura, 2020
Review of Local Antiquities, Local Identities: Art, Literature and Antiquarianism in Europ, c. 14... more Review of Local Antiquities, Local Identities: Art, Literature and Antiquarianism in Europ, c. 1400-1700, eds Kathleen Christian and Bianca de Divitiis (Manchester 2019)
The Art Bulletin, 2023
“Arabesques” (arabeschi) took shape as a term and concept in sixteenth-century Italy to describe ... more “Arabesques” (arabeschi) took shape as a term and concept in sixteenth-century Italy to describe motifs deriving from Islamic art. The formation of the concept reflects a complex interplay between art making and art theory, which played out differently across different media. In metalwork, the arabesque was conceptualized in tandem with conscious projects of imperialist appropriation, whereas in needlework, it furnished a theoretical basis for a highly conflicted affirmation of female artists. In the long term, these countervailing developments laid the groundwork for increasingly racialized identifications between the arabesque and the grotesque.
The Network of Cassinese Arts in Renaissance Italy, 2021
Ghiberti Teorico: Natura, arte, coscienza storica nel Quattrocento, eds. Fabian Jonietz, Wolf-Dietrich Löhr, Alessandro Nova, 2019
RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics, 2016
Renaissance Metapainting, eds. Péter Bokody and Alexander Nagel, 2020
This book addresses a phenomenon that pervades the field of art history: the fact that English ha... more This book addresses a phenomenon that pervades the field of art history: the fact that English has become our most prominent and widely adopted language. Art history employs language in a very particular way, one of its most basic aims being the verbal reconstruction of the visual past. The book seeks to shed light on the particular issues that English's rise to prominence poses for art history by investigating the history of the discipline itself: specifically, the extent to which the European tradition of art historical writing has always been shaped by the presence of dominant languages on the continent.
The central questions of the volume can thus be summarized as follows. What artistic, intellectual , and historical dynamics drove the pattern of linguistic ascendance and diffusion in the art historical writing of past centuries? How have the immediate, practical ends of writing in a common language had unintended, long-term consequences for the discipline? Were art historical concepts transformed or left behind with the onset of a new lingua franca, or did they often remain intact beneath a shifting veneer of new words?
Painting as a Modern Art in Early Renaissance Italy, 2019
Art historians have often looked back on the Italian Renaissance as a signal moment for the emerg... more Art historians have often looked back on the Italian Renaissance as a signal moment for the emergence of modern art. In doing so, they evaluate the modernity of the period in conscious hindsight: the Renaissance is modern insofar as some aspect of their own modernity can be seen to originate in it. Whatever the merits of this approach, it sheds little light on what it meant when Renaissance writers themselves called art modern. What is modern to us was not necessarily modern to them.
Painting as a Modern Art in Early Renaissance Italy reconstructs a historical concept of modern art on the basis of sources written between the 1390s and 1440s. The central point of reference in these sources was Giotto, the early fourteenth-century painter who, as one writer put it in 1442, “first modernized (modernizavit) ancient and mosaic figures.” The word “modern” was used in a wide variety of ways throughout this period, some quite polemical, others rather prosaic. To call art (ars) modern, however, was to invoke a stable, well-defined concept whose roots ran deep in late-medieval intellectual life. According to this concept, to make an art modern was to set it on a new foundation in science (scientia) and rationalize it accordingly.
As familiar as this formulation may sound in principle, each and every one of its key terms — art, modernity, science, rationality — meant something strikingly different in this period than it does in our time. The hallmark of modern art was not verisimilitude or expression or virtually any of the achievements that art historians associate with Giotto today, but rather the invention of techniques that aimed to imitate nature in its very manner of operation, aligning the concrete, step-by-step process of painting with the inner workings of nature itself. By reclaiming this concept and tracking its complex relation to early Renaissance concerns such as linear perspective and the canon of proportion, the book not only establishes a novel framework for the visual analysis of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Italian painting, but also unravels a fundamental master narrative of Western art history from within, clearing the way for renewed discussions of alternative modernities, including those that precede the story of modernism as we know it.
Annali di architettura, 2020
Review of Local Antiquities, Local Identities: Art, Literature and Antiquarianism in Europ, c. 14... more Review of Local Antiquities, Local Identities: Art, Literature and Antiquarianism in Europ, c. 1400-1700, eds Kathleen Christian and Bianca de Divitiis (Manchester 2019)