Alexis Culotta’s new book reviewed in Renaissance Quarterly

Art history professor Alexis Culotta’s new book Tracing the Visual Language of Raphael's Circle to 1527 (Brill 2020) was reviewed in the latest issue of Renaissance Quarterly. 

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.

Renaissance Quarterly , Volume 75 , Issue 4 , Winter 2022 , pp. 1333 - 1335

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/rqx.2022.352

The First Viral Images: Maerten De Vos, Antwerp Print, and the Early Modern Globe

Stephanie Porras, Professor of Art History at Tulane University and Chair of the Newcomb Art Department, has authored a new book, The First Viral Images Maerten De Vos, Antwerp Print, and the Early Modern Globe, published by Penn State University Press.

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.

Adrian Anagnost: When Modernism Met the Mob in Brasília

 “The striking architecture of the Brazilian capital made a dramatic backdrop for pro-Bolsonaro rioters, and this might also have helped thwart their attacks.”

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.

Visit: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-01-11/in-brasilia-modernist-architecture-met-political-violence

Perception, Ritual, and Memory in an Illustrated Manuscript of the Meditationes Vitae Christi

This month, Professor Holly Flora delivered the Daniel H. Silberberg Lecture at the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University. Her talk, titled “Perception, Ritual, and Memory in an Illustrated Manuscript of the Meditationes Vitae Christi,” discussed how medieval Clarissan nuns in Siena used a fourteenth-century illuminated manuscript for imaginative devotion.

Professor Flora's new book The Meditationes Vitae Christi Reconsidered New Perspectives on Text and Image (co-edited with Peter Toth) is a collection of critical essays on this fourteenth-century Sienese illuminated manuscript.

Called to the Camera: Black American Studio Photographers

PUBLICATION ALERT: Art History alum Zoe Ariyama (BA, 2022) recently published an article in the Brooklyn Rail on the New Orleans Museum of Art's current exhibition “Called to the Camera: Black American Studio Photographers.”

Art History alum Rebecca Villalpando (MA, 2022) contributed to this exhibition during her time as a graduate curatorial intern at NOMA.

Read the article here: https://brooklynrail.org/2023/12/artseen/Called-to-the-Camera-Black-American-Studio-Photographers

[James Presley Ball, Alexander S. Thomas, ca. late 1850s. Quarter plate daguerreotype. Courtesy Cincinnati Art Museum]

Dr. Anagnost's new book reviewed in Art Journal

"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."

Professor Adrian Anagnost’s new book Spatial Orders, Social Forms: Art and the City in Modern Brazil (Yale University Press, 2022) is reviewed by Fernando Luiz Lara in the current issue of Art Journal.

Dr. Adrian Anagnost is Associate Professor of Art History at Tulane. Her new book explores the intersections among art, architecture, and urbanism in Brazil from the 1920s through the 1960s. It shows how modernity was manifested in locally specific spatial forms linked to Brazil’s colonial and imperial past. Discussing the ways artists and architects understood urban planning as a tool to reorganize the world, control human action, and remedy social problems, Anagnost offers a nuanced account of the seeming conflict between modernist aesthetics and a predominately poor and historically disenfranchised urban public, with particular attention to regionalist forms of urban development.

Dr. Fernando Lara is the Potter Rose Professor in Urban Planning at the School of Architecture at the University of Texas at Austin.

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

Stephanie Porras awarded APS and CAA publication grants

Stephanie Porras is the recipient of the 2021 Publication Grant awarded by the Association of Print Scholars (APS in support of her forthcoming book, The First Viral Images: Maerten de Vos, Antwerp Print, and the Early Modern Globe.

The book, to be published by Penn State University Press, considers how a single engraving, the painting upon which it is based, and an illustrated book, traveled and functioned across the globe.  Porras cites examples of the engraving's influence as a model for Spanish and American painters, Chinese printmakers, and Filipino ivory carvers. She proposes that, more than a story of migrant artists and objects, this book reconsiders the role of images in the uneven processes of globalization, beyond the transmission of artistic styles, ornament, or iconographic motifs. The publication aims to test art historical notions of copying and agency, context, and viewership.

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.

New Publications by Art History Alumni and Graduate Students

Victoria I. Lyall (MA Tulane, PhD UCLA), the Mayer Curator of Pre-Columbian Art at the Denver Art Museum, co-edited a recently published book titled ReVisión: A New Look at Art in the Americas.

“ReVisión” collects essays from scholars of Latin American art history to help others understand the region’s nuanced history of creation, destruction, and renewal. In addition to essays, ReVisión showcases work from artists such as Alexander Apóstol, Juan Enrique Bedoya, Johanna Calle, and Ronny Quevedo in order to help visualize the questions of identity, exploitation of natural resources, and displacement from both before and after the conquest.” - University of Chicago Press

The book is also accompanied by an upcoming exhibition at the Denver Art Museum (dates TBA).

Lily Filson (BA Tulane, MA Syracuse, PhD, Ca'Foscari) published an article titled "Reformation England and the Performance of Wonder: Automata Technology and the Transfer of Power from Church to State" in Society and Politics vol. 13, no. 2.

Lucia Momoh (MA Tulane) published an article titled “The Art of Erasure” in The Iron Lattice, an art and culture print magazine based in New Orleans.

Two of our Art History and Latin American Studies PhD candidates have just recently published Smarthistory essays, "The History of Mexico: Diego Rivera’s Murals at the National Palace" by Megan Flattley and "Painting Aztec History" by Hayley Woodward. This was part of a special COVID-era program to support emerging art history scholars, sponsored by the Kress Foundation. 

Mia L. Bagneris Director of Africana Studies

Associate Professor Mia L. Bagneris has been appointed Director of the Africana Studies Program at Tulane.  On June 25th she was interviewed by Tulane School of Liberal Arts Dean Brian T. Edwards for the Give Green Tulane campaign. You can read Prof. Bagneris’s new essay, “Miscegenation in Marble: John Bell’s Octoroon” in June issue of The Art Bulletin (102, no. 2) June 2020, pp. 64-90. In her words: “[A]nalysis of The Octoroon contributes to a growing body of recent scholarship that seeks to address a lacuna within art history by probing the relationship of art and visual culture to the histories of race, slavery, colonialism, and empire.” Her book, Colouring the Caribbean: Race and the art of Agostino Brunias  was published by Manchester University Press in 2018.

Watermarks: Leonardo da Vinci and the Mastery of Nature

Leslie Geddes, Assistant Professor of Art History at Tulane University, has authored a new book, Watermarks: Leonardo da Vinci and the Mastery of Nature, published by Princeton University Press.

Formless, mutable, transparent: the element of water posed major challenges for the visual artists of the Renaissance. To the engineers of the era, water represented a force that could be harnessed for human industry but was equally possessed of formidable destructive power. For Leonardo da Vinci, water was an enduring fascination, appearing in myriad forms throughout his work. In Watermarks, Leslie Geddes explores the extraordinary range of Leonardo’s interest in water and shows how artworks by him and his peers contributed to hydraulic engineering and the construction of large river and canal systems.

From drawings for mobile bridges and underwater breathing apparatuses to plans for water management schemes, Leonardo evinced a deep interest in the technical aspects of water. His visual studies of the ways in which landscape is shaped by water demonstrated both his artistic mastery and probing scientific mind. Analyzing Leonardo’s notebooks, plans, maps, and paintings, Geddes argues that, for Leonardo and fellow artists, drawing was a form of visual thinking and problem solving essential to understanding and controlling water and other parts of the natural world. She also examines the material importance in this work of water-based media, namely ink, watercolor, and oil paint.

A compelling account of Renaissance art and engineering, Watermarks shows, above all else, how Leonardo applied his pictorial genius to water in order to render the natural world in all its richness and constant change.

Art of the Northern Renaissance

Stephanie Porras, Assistant Professor of Art History at Tulane University, has authored a new book, Art of the Northern Renaissance: Courts, Commerce and Devotion, published by Laurence King. 

In this lucid new account Porras charts the fascinating story of art in northern Europe from 1400–1570. Porras explores how artists and patrons from the regions north of the Alps – the Low Countries, France, England, Germany – responded to an era of rapid political, social, economic and religious change, while redefining the status of art.

Porras discusses paintings by artists from Jan van Eyck to Pieter Bruegel the Elder, as well as also sculpture, architecture, prints, metalwork, embroidery, tapestry and armour. 

Each chapter presents works from a 20-year period and focuses on a broad thematic issue, such as the flourishing of the print industry or the mobility of Northern artists and art works. The author traces the influence of aristocratic courts as centres of artistic production and the rise of an urban merchant class, leading to the creation of new consumers and new art products.

This book offers a richly illustrated narrative that allows readers to understand the progression, variety and key conceptual developments of Northern Renaissance art. 

Mia Bagneris: Redefining the Early African Diaspora

Assistant Professor Mia L. Bagneris, the Jesse Poesch Junior Professor of Art History in the Newcomb Art Department and her collaborator Anna Arabindan-Kesson of Princeton University's Department of Art and Archaeology have won an ACLS Collaborative Research Fellowship for their project Beyond Recovery: Reframing the Dialogues of Early African Diaspora Art History, c. 1700-1900. The book aims to redefine early African diaspora art history by revealing and reconsidering the varying entanglements of artists of African descent—and the art histories they have often been written out of—and to offer a model for breaking new ground in the field.

Read more about Prof. Bagneris' work on The Representation of Enslaved Mixed-Race Women in British Art in News from the Field, School of Liberal Arts newsletter, April 2017.

Elizabeth Boone: Painted Words

Elizabeth Boone, Professor of Art History and Chair of the Newcomb Art Department, authored a new book,  Painted Words: Nahua Catholicism, Politics, and Memory in the Atzaqualco Pictorial Catechism (Dumbarton Oaks, Washington, DC).

A collaboration between Boone, anthropologist Louise Burkhart, and historian David Tavárez, Painted Words presents a facsimile, decipherment, and analysis of a spectacular pictographic catechism from colonial Mexico. It records the Catholic catechism in pictures that were read sign by sign as aids to memorization and oral performance. Probably created for the family of the last Preconquest Aztec ruler Moctezuma, it shows how colonial manuscript painters reimagined Pre-Columbian writing and early evangelization, and articulated newly emerging assertions of indigenous identity and memorialized native history.

Stephanie Porras authors new book on Pieter Bruegel

The question of how to understand Bruegel’s art has cast the artist in various guises: as a moralizing satirist, comedic humanist, celebrator of vernacular traditions, and proto-ethnographer. Stephanie Porras, Assistant Professor of Art History, reorients these apparently contradictory accounts, arguing that the debate about how to read Bruegel has obscured his pictures’ complex relation to time and history.

Rather than viewing Bruegel’s art as simply illustrating the social realities of his day, Porras asserts that Bruegel was an artist deeply concerned with the past. In playing with the boundaries of the familiar and the foreign, history and the present, Bruegel’s images engaged with the fraught question of Netherlandish history in the years just prior to the Dutch Revolt, when imperial, religious, and national identities were increasingly drawn into tension. His pictorial style and his manipulation of traditional iconographies reveal the complex relations, unique to this moment, among classical antiquity, local history, and art history.

An important reassessment of Renaissance attitudes toward history and of Renaissance humanism in the Low Countries, this volume traces the emergence of archaeological and anthropological practices in historical thinking, their intersections with artistic production, and the developing concept of local art history.

Pieter Bruegel's Historical Imagination, published by Penn State University Press, will be available April 15, 2016. 

Teresa Cole featured in Contemporary American Print Makers

Ellsworth Woodward Professor Teresa Cole is featured in Contemporary American Print Makers, a collection of work by more than seventy print-based artists and thirty print shops from across the United States whose work embraces the history and techniques of traditional printmaking while pushing the bounds of new print media. Traditional techniques of work featured include: lithography, intaglio, screenprint, and relief. While new techniques include; installation based, digital, fiber and other forms of new print media. Contemporary American Print Makers features artists of all career levels, from emerging to professionals and professors and the print shops featured include shops who publish editions for high caliber artists as well as cooperative and community based shops from around the country.