“Viollet-le-Duc’s Judith at Vézelay: Romanesque Sculpture Restoration as (Nationalist) Art.” Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide 10, no. 1 (2011): http://www.19thc-artworldwide.org (original) (raw)
Related papers
JHNA, 2016
This article presents a new attribution and dating for a painting of Judith with the Head of Holofernes. A monogram, decorative elements, and technical features strongly suggest that it was made by Jan Cornelisz Vermeyen around 1525–30.The decorative details are placed within the context of contemporary sketchbooks and pattern books. The painting technique — including preparatory layers, brushwork, and the depiction of fabrics — is discussed in relation to other paintings by Vermeyen and Jan Gossart. The subject matter of the powerful female figure gives clues to the painting’s likely patron: Margaret of Austria, regent of the Netherlands.
The paper focuses on the Romanesque wooden Crucifix of the church of Sainte-Marie at Cherier Le Vieux Bourg (Loire, Rhônes- Alpes, France). It is stylistically related to some other sculptures originating in the Massif Central region and, in particular, to a Christ from Herment in the Musée de Cluny (Cl. 2149), a Crucifix from Lavaudieu, now divided between the Musée du Louvre (head: r.f. 1662) and the Metropolitan Museum of Art (body: 25.120.221), a head of Christ in the treasury of Clermont-Ferrand cathedral. Furthermore, the Cherier Crucifix appears to be connected to the Madonna and child statues – the most important being in the Metropolitan Museum of Art – attributed to a sculptor conventionally known as “The Morgan Master”. Thus, these wooden sculptures are assumed to have been carved in the workshop of this anonymous master. Some comparisons with Romanesque stone sculpture in the Rhone Valley during the mid-twelfth century are made in order to place the Cherier Crucifix in a chronological and artistic context.
Questions of Expertise in Culture, Arts and Design, 2020
We performed a technological investigation of Judith with the Head of Holofernes (a copy of Cristofano Allori's work) from the Nizhny Tagil Museum of Fine Arts to clarify the painting's attribution. According to the current attribution, the copy was created in the 17th century Italy. Pigment analysis using X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy and scanning electron microscopy with energy dispersive spectroscopy was undertaken in order to provide indicators of the approximate date of the Nizhny Tagil copy. The analysis results-supplemented with evidence from UV-imaging and micro-imaging, radiographic examination and studies of the paintings' support, ground and paint layers-agree with the existing attribution but do not necessarily confirm it. Comparison of the technical characteristics of the Nizhny Tagil Judith with the techniques of Western and Russian painting allows us to extend the dating. In addition, certain fragments of the painting were examined to provide insight into specifics of differences between the copy and the original, which turned out to be mainly the results of previous restorations.
Judith and the Dragon: A Jesuit architectural relief from Gorgora Iyäsus church, 1626–1632
Aethiopica, 2016
In the 2014 excavations at the Jesuit church of Gorgora Iyäsus on the northern shore of Lake Ṭana a remarkable relief in stone was unearthed. The relief was originally part of the church’s façade. It represents the biblical heroine Judith over a dragon and it contains two inscriptions in Gǝʿǝz from the Book of Judith and Genesis. This piece represents one of the few recorded inscriptions on stone from the end of the Aksumite period to the present time. The article focuses on the historical context that witnessed the production of this relief and provides an interpretation of its iconography.
Bibliotheca Archaeologica, 2019
The role of individual sculptors in creating the ambulatory capitals in the largest basilica in Christendom at Cluny remains a mystery. The unresolved issue of individual creativity leaves open three important questions about this powerful abbey which controlled hundreds of monasteries throughout Europe in the eleventh century: What was the specific artistic context-the origin, training and career path of the major sculptors who worked at the mother church at the start of construction? What was the relationship, in time and influence, between the focal ambulatory capitals and similar sculptures at numerous local sites? And what role did artists play in determining the form and meaning of Cluny sculptures and related monuments? This book traces the career of a sculptor who worked on the earliest capitals in the abbey church at Cluny. It documents his artistic preferences at previous Burgundian projects, gathering a variety of evidence intended to be on the one hand precise, complex and subtle, and on the other convincingly repetitious. He treated gesture, pose, anatomy, drapery, foliage, architecture, background and space not only consistently but also in a complementary fashion. Plainly put, he blurred the traditional distinction between sculpture and architecture, displaying a rich and unique combination of artistic preferences even as he worked with different kinds of patrons on various subjects at numerous and diverse monuments. These findings are supported with high-resolution photographs taken at telling angles from high ladders and scaffolding. This version of the creative process at the mother church, in which the Cluniac brothers picked a local talent to carry out one of the most important sculptural commissions in Europe, differs markedly from the standard one based largely on presumed but undocumented artistic priorities of the monks. Prevailing theory assumes the monks had an international perspective when it came to art as they tried to establish at Cluny a "new Rome" as the centerpiece of their monastic empire. Rather than tap an experienced sculptor who worked in the indigenous masonry tradition, they would have looked toward foreign lands to find suitable artists who based their designs on "high" forms of art such as ivory, painting, and metalwork. C. Edson Armi Is a research professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He has written books on Cluniac architecture and sculpture, design and construction in Romanesque architecture, Gothic sculpture, and American car design. He received the Society of Architectural Historians Founders' Award, the C.I.N.O.A. International Art History Prize, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Year: 2019 Publisher: L'ERMA di BRETSCHNEIDER Series: Bibliotheca Archaeologica, 58 ISBN: 978-88-913-1745-2 ISBN: 978-88-913-1748-3 (PDF) Binding: Hardcover Pages: 124, 6 ill. B/N, 116 ill. Col. Size: 21,5 x 28 cm