This book explores how the Renaissance artist’s style – one infused with borrowed visual quotations from other artists both past and present – proved influential in his relationship with associate Baldassare Peruzzi and in the development of the artists within his thriving workshop.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/rqx.2022.352
Publisher's Synopsis As a social phenomenon and a commonplace of internet culture, virality provides a critical vocabulary for addressing questions raised by the global mobility and reproduction of early modern artworks. This book uses the concept of virality to study artworks' role in the uneven processes of early modern globalization.
Drawing from archival research in Asia, Europe, and the Americas, Stephanie Porras traces the trajectories of two interrelated objects made in Antwerp in the late sixteenth century: Gerónimo Nadal's Evangelicae historiae imagines, an illustrated devotional text published and promoted by the Society of Jesus, and a singular composition by Maerten de Vos, St. Michael the Archangel. Both were reproduced and adapted across the early modern world in the seventeenth century. Porras examines how and why these objects traveled and were adopted as models by Spanish and Latin American painters, Chinese printmakers, Mughal miniaturists, and Filipino ivory carvers. Reassessing the creative labor underpinning the production of a diverse array of copies, citations, and reproductions, Porras uses virality to elucidate the interstices of the agency of individual artists or patrons, powerful gatekeepers and social networks, and economic, political, and religious infrastructures. In doing so, she tests and contests several analytical models that have dominated art-historical scholarship of the global early modern period, putting pressure on notions of copying, agency, context, and viewership.
Vital and engaging, The First Viral Images sheds new light on how artworks, as agents of globalization, navigated and contributed to the emerging and intertwined global infrastructures of Catholicism, commerce, and colonialism.
Check out Professor Adrian Anagnost’s recent publication in CityLab on Bloomberg! Her article “When Modernism Met the Mob in Brasília” discusses recent Brazilian political events in relation to the city of Brasília, which was designed by urbanist Lúcio Costa with buildings by architect Oscar Niemeyer.
Michelle Foa, Associate Professor of Art History in the Newcomb Art Department of Tulane University
Friday, January 20, 2023, 5:30 p.m.
Cleveland Museum of Art, Morley Family Lecture Hall
The nineteenth century witnessed a revolution in the manufacture and use of paper that had far-reaching effects on the arts. This lecture, organized to complement the exhibition Nineteenth-Century French Drawings from the Cleveland Museum of Art, situates the changes that paper underwent in the context of key developments in trade, cotton cultivation, and textile production and consumption around the world. It also highlights artists’ and writers’ reactions to these shifts, revealing their profound concern about the longevity of the paper supports of their pictures and publications.
Michelle Foa is associate professor of art history in the Newcomb Art Department of Tulane University. Her research focuses on 19th-century French art and visual and material culture.
This event is supported by the Getty Foundation as part of The Paper Project initiative and by the Wolfgang Ratjen Foundation, Liechtenstein.
{image: Études de chiffonniers (detail), 1849. Gustave Doré (French, 1832–1883). Lithograph; 33.8 x 25.7 cm. Bibliothèque Nationale de France. Photo: BnF}
Listen in to Episode 4: Mapping the Uncharted, where Prof Geddes talks about how maps reveal the ways in which we try to expand beyond the limits of our vision and how mapmaking can help uncover the mysteries of the world around us through representing vantage points we can't see or experience firsthand. From the Mississippi Delta in Louisiana to an icy moon of the distant
planet Saturn, the episode goes to see how geography and design, as well
as art and science fuse to create the maps we often take for granted.
Available here: https://triennale.org/en/magazine/from-moon-2-episode-4
and wherever podcasts are found!
"Anagnost has done a superb job of reuniting the discussions of art and architecture, reminding us of the intense exchanges between people working on different media and at different scales."
Citation: Fernando Luiz Lara, review of Modernity for the Masses: Antonio Bonet’s Dreams for Buenos Aires and Spatial Orders, Social Forms: Art and the City in Modern Brazil in Art Journal 81, no. 3 (2022): 116-118, DOI: 10.1080/00043249.2022.2110425
Abstract: The French fort of La Balise, built in the early eighteenth-century, was at the nexus of marshland and sea in the Mississippi River Delta. Originally, the fortified settlement aimed to protect French colonial interests and secure access to the Mississippi River at a crucial juncture. Today, due to land loss along the Gulf of Mexico, the fort lies underwater at most tides, but visual evidence remains: a series of ink and watercolor maps produced for administrative oversight and sent to the Dépôt des Fortifications des Colonies.
Recognizing both advantages and hazards of the landscape, these maps document the enmeshment of fort and the Mississippi Delta’s complex ecosystem. Passage from the Gulf of Mexico to the river was fraught with peril, evident in references to shipwrecks alongside pictorial and textual demarcations of currents and oceanic depths. Simultaneously, French mercantile and social orders were imposed on the landscape, with a brickyard and designated settlement for enslaved Africans on an adjoining island. Exploitation of natural resources and racialized spatial segregation were formative to the colonial project in the Americas. We argue that depictions of the fort’s construction, amidst the ever-shifting environs of the Gulf South, reveal how topographic variability posed difficulties to pictorial rendering. Troubling rigid conceptualizations of landscapes and seascapes, maps reveal interpenetrating salt and freshwaters, shoals, and islands. As the French sought to make militarily secure this mutable terrain, the land itself challenged visual discernment, with colonial expansion, imperial power, and enslavement set against a natural landscape that thwarted cartographic fixity.
On September 14th at 6pm, Dr. Michelle Foa will present on the influence of Degas' visit to New Orleans and the centrality of the cotton trade to his work. This in-person lecture will take place at the Gallier House, 1132 Royal Street, New Orleans. Registration is required through eventbrite.
Join Dr. Foa in-person at the September Gallier Gathering as she discusses the French painter Edgar Degas' visit to New Orleans and the centrality of cotton and the transatlantic cotton trade to his work and European society at large.
About this Event
Edgar Degas’s stay in New Orleans in 1872-73, which marked his only visit to the New World, resulted in two remarkable paintings of a cotton office. Linking Southern cotton to the textiles in his countless pictures of dancers, laundresses, and bathers and to his works’ paper supports, this lecture will demonstrate the centrality of the material to the artist’s body of work. More broadly, Degas’s Cotton Office paintings, as well as drawings and correspondence from his time abroad, reveal that the artist had begun thinking about the world, his work, and the subjects depicted therein in more geographically expansive and interconnected terms. These pictures and letters reflect his newfound understanding of the ties that joined the Old and New Worlds to one another and the global circulation of people, goods, and communications in the later nineteenth century.
Michelle Foa is Associate Professor of Art History in the Newcomb Art Department of Tulane University, and her research focuses on nineteenth-century French art and visual and material culture. Her first book, Georges Seurat: The Art of Vision, was published by Yale University Press in 2015. She is currently at work on a book on Degas, and part of this research published in The Art Bulletin was awarded the Nineteenth-Century Studies Association Article Prize in 2021. Her research and teaching have been supported by numerous grants and fellowships, including from the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
This event is made possible by funding from the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities. Funding for 2021 Rebirth grants has been administered by the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities (LEH) and provided by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) as part of the American Rescue Plan (ARP) and the NEH Sustaining the Humanities through the American Rescue Plan (SHARP) initiative.
Any views, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed in this program do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.
The Newcomb Art Department welcomes Barbara E. Mundy to the faculty as Professor of Art History and the Martha and Donald Robertson Chair in Latin American Art.
Barbara E. Mundy’s scholarship dwells in zones of contact between Native peoples and settler colonists as they forged new visual cultures in the Americas. She has been particularly interested in the social construction of space and its imaginary, which was the subject of her first book, The Mapping of New Spain. Her most recent book, The Death of Aztec Tenochtitlan, the Life of Mexico City, draws on Indigenous texts and representations to counter a colonialist historiography and to argue for the city’s nature as an Indigenous city through the sixteenth century.
Mundy's current book project, "The Embodiment of the Word: European Book Culture and New World Manuscripts." Rather than considering Indigenous manuscripts as phenomena separate from European books, it situates native bookmakers in the midst of the new technological revolution brought about by the printing press. While Martin Luther’s innovations (and conflagrations) take up most of the oxygen in the history of print in the early sixteenth century, attracting less attention, but equally radical, was the Spanish crown’s use of the new technology to control, via standardization, governance, language, and history. The testing ground of this imperial project was the “Indies,” as their American territories were called, and it is within this context that her protagonists--Indigenous writers, painters and bookmakers--operated.
With Dana Leibsohn, Mundy is the co-creator of Vistas: Visual Culture in Spanish America, 1520-1820. Digital projects are a fundamental part of her teaching practice. Mundy was the 2021-22 Kislak Chair at the Library of Congress; she has had fellowships at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art and at the John Carter Brown Library. She serves on the editorial board of Estudios de cultura náhuatl and is the current president of the American Society for Ethnohistory. Prior to coming to Tulane, she was a Professor of Art History at Fordham University in New York.
The 2022 Weiss Fellows are Michelle Foa, associate professor of art history in the Newcomb Art Department in the School of Liberal Arts and a Carnegie Professor at the Phyllis M. Taylor Center for Social Innovation and Design Thinking, and Tiffany Lin, associate professor of architecture and design program director at the School of Architecture.
The recipients of 2022 President’s Awards for Excellence in Graduate and Professional Teaching are Alessandra Bazzano, associate professor at the School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine, Carnegie Corporation of New York Professor of Social Entrepreneurship at the Phyllis M. Taylor Center for Social Innovation and Design Thinking, and director of the Tulane Center of Excellence in Maternal and Child Health, and Guadalupe García, associate professor in the Department of History at the School of Liberal Arts.
Dr. Porras also received a grant from the College Art Association's Millard Meiss Publication Fund, which supports book-length scholarly manuscripts in the history of art, visual studies, and related subjects that have been accepted by a publisher on their merits, but cannot be published in the most desirable form without a subsidy.
Stephanie Porras is Associate Professor of Art History at Tulane University. She is the author of Pieter Bruegel’s Historical Imagination (2016), Art of the Northern Renaissance: Courts, Commerce and Devotion (2018) and co-editor of The Young Dürer: Drawing the Figure (2013). She currently serves as Reviews Editor for The Art Bulletin and is on the editorial board of the Nederlands Kunsthistorisches Jaarboek. Her forthcoming book, The First Viral Images: Maerten de Vos, Antwerp Print, and the Early Modern Globe, considers how a single engraving, the painting upon which it is based, and an illustrated book, circled the globe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
The Office of Research held the first Tulane University Research, Scholarship and Artistic Achievement Awards on Thursday, Nov. 4, to honor outstanding Tulane scholars and recognize their exceptional research. Art History was well represented in the awards ceremony held at the Higgons Hotel in downtown New Orleans.
Elizabeth Hill Boone was inducted into the Research Hall of Fame. Mia L. Bagneris received the Spirit of Tulane Award, which recognizes outstanding achievement of scholars whose work embodies Tulane’s motto, “Not for oneself, but for one’s own,” and enhances the university’s research mission. Prof. Bagneris and Adrian Anagnost received Funding Awards in recognition of their $225,000 grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to convene a year-long site-specific inquiry exploring changing historical narratives in New Orleans and the greater Gulf South region.
See Tulane News to read more about the ceremony and award reciepients.
Since 1994, Elizabeth has served as the Martha and Donald Robertson Chair in Latin American Art. Author of six monographs, co-author of another two books, and editor or co-editor of fourteen other volumes, her work has been influential not only in art history, but in the related fields of history, anthropology and literary theory. In 2018, she was named the College Art Association’s Distinguished Scholar, the first Latin Americanist art historian to receive this honor since its founding in 2001. She was also the first Latin Americanist to hold the Andrew Mellon Professorship at the National Gallery of Art in 2006-8. In 2010 she was Professor invitée at the École Pratique de Hautes Etudes, at the Sorbonne. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Academia Mexicana de la Historia and recipient of the government of Mexico's Order of the Aztec Eagle for her contributions to Aztec scholarship. Her latest monograph book, Descendants of Aztec Pictography: The Cultural Encyclopedias of Sixteenth-Century Mexico (University of Texas Press, 2021), is the first synthetic analysis of the pictorial encyclopedias of Aztec culture created in the decades after the Spanish conquest. After 27 years at Tulane, Elizabeth is retiring at the end of this academic year. Her career at Tulane University has been extraordinary, to say the least, and we can think of no better tribute than to offer her the Research Award.
Since his arrival at Tulane in 2018, Sean has helped to rewrite curriculum in the photo area, separating darkroom and digital practices; he has also overhauled the digital and darkroom spaces, enhancing usability and access. His courses are always overenrolled and his teaching evaluations are superlative. Here are some examples of his student evaluations: “Sean is extremely supportive and knowledgeable about what he teaches. He makes material exciting, engaging, and relevant.“, and “He is Thanos with all the infinity stones.”
Art Chair Stephanie Porras says, “I would particularly like to praise Sean for making adjustments to his teaching this year – not only folding in the switch to hybrid teaching, but also readjusting all his syllabi to center BIPOC scholars and artists. By overhauling his syllabi in this way, Sean modelled what it means to decenter and question the artistic canon. He shared resources with other faculty in the department and encouraged all of us to revisit the readings and artists we use to teach the history, theory and practice of art.”
Michelle Foa's article "In Transit: Edgar Degas and the Matter of Cotton, between New World and Old," was just published in the September 2020 issue of The Art Bulletin. Edgar Degas’ four-month stay in New Orleans in 1872-73, which marked his first experience crossing the Atlantic, resulted in two remarkable paintings of a cotton office. Foa’s article analyzes the important connections between Southern cotton, the textiles that fill the artist’s pictures of dancers, laundresses and bathers, and the paper he used for many of his drawings.
This year she has given lectures at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (virtually) and Wofford College. In July she joined the Board of Directors of the National Committee for the History of Art.
