Visual discourse of distinction: early Netherlandish painting as a vehicle of social and political identity (original) (raw)
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Art and Identity: Visual Culture, Politics and Religion in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance
"""This book provides a fully contextualised overview on aspects of visual culture, and how this was the product of patronage, politics, and religion in some European countries between the 13th and 17th centuries. The research that is showcased here offers new perspectives on the conception, production and reception of artworks as a means of projecting core values, ideals, and traditions of individuals, groups, and communities. This volume features contributions from established scholars and new researchers in the field, and examines how art contributed to the construction of identities by means of new archival research and a thorough interdisciplinary approach. The authors suggest that the use of conventions in style and iconography allowed the local and wider community to take part in rituals and devotional practices where these works were widely recognized symbols. However, alongside established traditions, new, ad-hoc developments in style and iconography were devised to suit individual requirements, and these are fully discussed in relevant case-studies. This book also contributes to a new understanding of the interaction between artists, patrons, and viewers in Medieval and Renaissance times. """ Art and Identity offers a thought-provoking study of ways in which art contributed to the construction of a variety of identities in Europe between the mid thirteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Drawing on recent and innovative research by both established and early career scholars, it provides an illuminating demonstration of the complexity inherent in the process of defining the many different and overlapping identities within medieval and renaissance society and reveals the multiple uses to which art was put in order to convey, embody and affirm these. In so doing, it exemplifies the value of an interdisciplinary approach to the subject, paying proper attention to the relevance of the specific political, social and religious contexts in which, and for which, particular works of art were made. A further strength of this collection is that it encompasses a variety of artistic media and addresses works of art produced not only in Italy long recognised as a major centre of art production but also in other parts of northern and central Europe. The essays in Art and Identity can be warmly recommended to historians, art historians, and the general reader with an interest in the art, social practices and rituals of medieval and renaissance society --Diana Norman, Professor Emeritus of Art History, The Open University, UK This very well-organised collection brings together some exciting new work on questions of artistic and cultural identity between the thirteenth and seventeenth centuries. The essay contributions, based on an excellent postgraduate conference held at the University of Aberdeen in the summer of 2008, build a varied and rich picture of the role of visual art in the formation of cultural identity in a period of great change and diversity. The organisation of the essays into three sections dealing successively with questions of political and family identity, individual and communal patronage and finally specific issues of iconography and style, gives the collection a broad thematic unity, even as individual contributions [throw] new light on a wide range of specific topics and images. Another kind of unity is provided by the contextual methodology employed by all the contributors, which insistently places the visual image at the heart of the cultural process of identity formation. The volume will form a welcome addition to the burgeoning art historical literature examining the central and formative role of art in the formation of cultural identity in what was a key period in European history. --Dr Tom Nichols, Senior Lecturer in the History of Art, University of Aberdeen
10 • ART, SYMBOLISM AND THE EXPRESSION OF GROUP IDENTITIES IN EARLY-MEDIEVAL FRISIA
Frisians of the Early Middle Ages, 2021
Early-medieval Frisia, like the axis of a wheel, was situated in between the Frankish, Scandinavian and Anglo-Saxon worlds. 'Frisian' works of art reflect this intermediate position, as a fascinating mixture of cultural influences. In this paper, different ways of expressing group identities within the area defined in Lex Frisionum are investigated, in relation to the shape and decoration of metal objects that circulated among its coastal population. These objects include copper-alloy brooches that were exchanged within family groups, prestige goods that were distributed as gifts among members of the regional and local elites, and items with a (pre-)Christian symbolism that could circulate both within family and among elite groups. Chronologically, this paper starts with the migration of ' Anglo-Saxons' in the late fourth and fifth centuries, leading to the replacement and partial re-shuffling of the original, Roman-period population of the Dutch coastal area. The sixth and seventh centuries saw the rise of regional and supra-regional kingdoms in this area, until Frisia had become part of the Frankish realm during the Saxon Wars of Charlemagne (772-804). In this four-hundred-year time span, the transition can be seen from 'Frisian' communities to a Frankish population, from independent kingdoms to a Frankish district, and from non-Christian belief systems to Christianity-all affecting the way 'Frisians' felt related to one or more co-resident, political and religio-ideological groups.
The Role of Painting in the Definition of Spaces in Medieval Art
Following Forms, Following Functions: Practices and Disciplines in Dialogue, 2018
Mural paintings play a fundamental role in the definition of the architectural spaces. Far from being a mere a container/contained kind of relationship, they deeply interact with the architecture by simulating spaces not existing in the physical reality and by suggesting mental and spiritual spaces thanks to the allusive function of the images. In a well-known article published in 1979, the scientists S. J. Gould and R. C. Lewontin, used the images in the spandrels in St. Mark in Venice as a starting point for a criticism to the evolutionist and adaptationist theories: in their interpretation, the spandrels became a metaphor of biological characters which were originally born for other functions ¬¬- or which had no function at all ¬- and that only subsequently were used in an adaptationist way. Starting from this article and as part of an attempt to find an objectual function of mural painting, we will present some case-studies from many geographical areas and centuries, aiming to show how Medieval mural painting did not limited to an “exaptive” function, forcing itself into the dimensions of the architectural container, but it will be shown how it could even “manipulate” the form of the spaces housing it.
“Art and class struggle: The Diagrammatic Imaginary.”
ArtMargins 10.3 , 2021
I'm standing in front of Velázquez's Las hilanderas, o la fábula de Aracne, from roughly 1657, as I have so many times before. A motley assortment of interpretations is before me, too: iconographic, formal, historicist. I find war and classes: Arachne against Athena; humans and gods; Jupiter and Europa; the purchasing class and the weaving class, in the twinned spaces of the tapestry factory of Santa Isabel, in Madrid; the clash between the line drawn by the gazes that draw me in or draw me to the different spaces (the woman in the middle plane looking out; the bull's one eye, reaching out from the tapestry) and the spiral that winds from the uncarded wool hanging, massive, unformed, on the wall; through the whirl of the thread's production in the first plane; up the steps and into the matter of the tapestries that form the canvas's third plane, hung on the virtual plane, the canvas, that's both a fourth, receding plane and the material support for the whole fraught architecture. (Icons: the spinning wheel; the ladder; circle/line) Today my eyes come back to the blank wheel in motion almost on the plane of the canvas. Let's translate Marx's famous proposition that "The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas." Our translations of this sentence from The German Ideology sound very much like restatements, and go like this: "The aesthetic of the ruling class is in every epoch the ruling aesthetic" and "The art most valued is in every epoch the art of the ruling class," by which we mean "the art valued by the ruling class." Our translations run into four classes of problems.
This paper deals with the remarkable genre of kunstkammer paintings – that is, paintings of picture galleries – that emerged and enjoyed a short life of fifty-odd years in the first half of the 17th century in Antwerp. These works have prompted a great deal of iconographic analysis, but this paper probes the question of whether there can be a more affective and speculative analysis of how these paintings moved their viewers and how they themselves were objects in motion. Such pictures were only made possible through the early modern development of the portable, mobile easel painting as a commodity. A private picture gallery (and, by extension, a picture of a private picture gallery) is the product of an image that is already moving -- that is, an image in circulation. This mobility of cultural artifacts, I will argue, is intimately related to shifts in the early modern notions of knowledge, virtue, and subjectivity that had far-reaching consequences. While such works may have enabled viewers to fix and confirm their identities as learned, elite, and even virtuous, their mobilization of the categories of the curious and marvelous may have worked in more intense and less predictable ways. I argue that alchemical concepts of sympathy, hybridity and correspondence that guided the formation of encyclopedic wunderkammern were also active in the allegorical, intertextual compositions of gallery paintings, such that meaning was set in motion across and between diverse images and textual sources at the same time as that the allegorical mode attempted to secure and contain those meanings within the framework of a moral message. The affect of these paintings, I would like to suggest, may also have figured larger disturbances in the social fabric; the mobile sign may have been amenable to aspirational burghers keen to demonstrate their aristocratic virtue (and hence their social mobility) through displays of knowledge and judgment, but the internal contradictions of an allegorical conception of knowledge ultimately contributed to a shift away from the form of the encyclopedic collection in actual collecting practices and in their representation in cabinet paintings.