Art History & Archaeology Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2744
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Item Mantegna's 'Mars and Venus': The Pursuit of Pictorial Eloquence(2009) Cody, Steven Joseph; Gill, Meredith J.; Art History and Archaeology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This paper examines the pictorial composition of Andrea Mantegna's Mars and Venus and its relation to the culture of letters and antiquarianism present in the studiolo of Isabella d'Este Gonzaga. By analyzing Mantegna's use of contrapposto, a visual motif stemming from the rhetorical figure of "antithesis," I argue that the artist formally engages Classical rhetoric and the principles of Leon Battista Alberti's De Pictura. Mantegna's dialogue with Albertian and rhetorical theory visually frames the narrative of Mars and Venus in a way that ultimately frames the viewer's understanding of Isabella's character as a patron of the arts. But it also has ramifications for how the viewer understands Mantegna's activities as a painter. By focusing my investigation on the significance of pictorial form and Mantegna's process of imitation, I look to emphasize the intellectual nuances of Isabella's approach to image making and to link Mantegna's textual knowledge to his visual recuperation of Classical art.Item Jacques Le Moyne De Morgues (c. 1533-1588) and the Origins of Seventeenth-Century Netherlandish Flower Still Lifes(2009) Kim, Sohee; Wheelock, Arthur K.; Art History and Archaeology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation examines the contribution of the French artist Jacques le Moyne de Morgues to the development of seventeenth–century Netherlandish flower still lifes, a heretofore understudied subject. Le Moyne has mostly been discussed as a cartographer and as the official artist for the French expedition to Florida from 1564 to 1565, and his impact on the origin of seventeenth–century Netherlandish flower still lifes has been largely overlooked because he was from abroad and active in England. Le Moyne was a botanical artist who gained his early training in the French manuscript tradition and continued to develop his career as flower painter in a world fascinated with collecting rare and exotic plants. Le Moyne's experiences of collecting and recording plants during the Florida exploration encouraged him to portray botanical specimens as living plants after his return to France. Soon after, his accurately and delicately illustrated floral images were known to seventeenth–century Netherlandish flower artists, including the printmaker Crispijn de Passe the Elder and the painter Jacques de Gheyn. At the core of this study is the conclusion that the collaboration between botanists, artists and publishers was a crucial component in the development of independent flower paintings. Botanists and publishers were at the center of a network of flower collectors, gardeners and artists, focusing on collecting and exchanging rare and exotic plants as well as illustrations of them. In particular, the renowned botanist Carolus Clusius and the publisher Hans Woutneel were important links between Le Moyne and seventeenth–century Netherlandish flower artists, involving a young generation of flower painters with projects that incorporated floral illustrations. In circulating botanical illustrations, Clusius and Woutneel supplied precisely colored drawings by Le Moyne to early Netherlandish flower artists, including Jacques de Gheyn and Crispijn de Passe the Elder, encouraging them to expand on Le Moyne's approach in their own floral images. Clusius engaged Jacques de Gheyn to illustrate flowers and small creatures in an album containing twenty–two watercolors (1600–1604, Paris: Institut Néerlandais), and Woutneel encouraged De Passe to base many of the images in hisCognosite Lilia on Le Moyne's delicately rendered watercolors.Item PANG XUNQIN (1906-1985) - A CHINESE AVANT-GARDE'S METAMORPHOSIS, 1925-1946, AND QUESTIONS OF "AUTHENTICITY"(2009) Zhu, Xiaoqing; Kuo, Jason; Art History and Archaeology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation has three goals. The first is to chart the artistic life of Pang Xunqin (1906-1985) and his art works from 1929 to 1946. Pang's metamorphosis from an aspiring young artist in Paris and Shanghai in the 1920s and 30s, into an artist in his own right, a graphic designer, an educator, and a scholar of the history of Chinese art and craft, while ceaselessly trying to renew himself - all this is a record that deserves an art historical recognition. The second goal is to locate Pang Xunqin in the historiography of Chinese modern art in an attempt to problematize issues of inclusion and exclusion in the historiography of the field. The third goal, which is closely tied to the second, is to utilize post-colonial inquiries to explore myriad issues of non-Western modernism embodied in Pang Xunqin's case. Such issues include the divisions among the "traditionalists," the "academic realists," and the "modernists," colonial cosmopolitanism in the Shanghai of the 30s, and the appropriation of "primitivism" in the 40s. Attention also focuses on the issues of authenticity and "hybridity," Western orientalization of the East and self-orientalization by the East in cross-cultural encounters, and identity politics and nationalistic agendas in the construct of the guohua (national painting) and xihua (Western painting) divide. The post-colonial methodology employed here helps raise questions regarding the binary construct of tradition vs. modernity, the East vs. the West, the center vs. the periphery, and the global vs. the local. By placing Pang Xunqin's case in its semi-colonial historical and transnational context and by engaging in dialogue with the recent rich scholarship on cultural and post-colonial critiques, in conjunction with a formal analysis of his paintings and designs, this dissertation offers not only a monographic study of Pang's artistic life but also a critical examination and reassessment of the established art historical narratives of Western-trained artists in the historiography of Chinese modern art.Item Rineke Dijkstra and Contemporary Subjectivity(2008) Quick, Jennifer Eileen; Shannon, Joshua A; Art History and Archaeology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In this thesis, I argue that the work of contemporary Dutch photographer Rineke Dijkstra (b. 1959) complicates how we understand subjectivity, or the way that humans come into being and exist in the world, by both reinforcing and countering the idea that the subject is a product of social relations. Dijkstra's large-scale photographs of individuals propose a dialectical subject who is constituted both by his or her own agency as well as within exterior social circumstances. This is especially significant in light of the fact that influential scholarship on contemporary art has largely been dominated by the construct of the subject as socially determined. The theory of subjectivity represented in Dijkstra's photographs therefore demonstrates a certain ambivalence that is descriptive of contemporary subjectivity. As such, Dijkstra's photographs offer a fresh take on how we conceive of subjectivity today.Item Coloring the Narrative: Color Symbolism in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Painting(2008) Hanson, Brighton Kelley; Wheelock, Arthur K; Art History and Archaeology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Numerous attributes grace the allegorical personifications in Cesare Ripa's 1593 Iconologia; included among these are colored gowns. In the seventeenth-century, Karel van Mander, Samuel van Hoogstraten, and Gesina ter Borch also write of the symbolism found in color. However, such color symbolism is rarely mentioned in modern interpretations of Dutch narrative paintings. Three case studies seek to test the applicability and limitations of color symbolism as an interpretative tool in narrative paintings by Karel van Mander, Samuel van Hoogstraten and Gerard ter Borch. In these, color symbolism provides the meaning behind decorum when interpreted through figures' garments. The appendix contains a comparative chart of the color symbolism in texts by Cesare Ripa, Karel van Mander, Justus de Harduijn, Gesina ter Borch, and Samuel van Hoogstraten.Item IGNACIO ZULOAGA AND THE PROBLEM OF SPAIN(2009) Crosson, Dena; Hargrove, June; Art History and Archaeology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)ABSTRACT Title of dissertation: IGNACIO ZULOAGA AND THE PROBLEM OF SPAIN Dena Crosson, Doctor of Philosophy, 2009 Dissertation directed by: Professor June Hargrove Department of Art History and Archeology This dissertation examines the career of Ignacio Zuloaga (1870-1945), a highly successful and influential artist during his lifetime, in the context of nationalism and the political and cultural conditions that informed his artistic persona. Positioning himself to both Spanish and foreign audiences as the "painter of Spain," his style and subject matter simultaneously exploited foreign preconceptions about Spain while serving as a lightning rod for the critical nationalist discourse preoccupying Spanish political and cultural leaders during the first decades of the twentieth century. In the 1910s and 1920s the vernacular nationalism he practiced was not opposed to modernism. But by the 1930s, nationalism had become associated with rising fascist movements both in Europe and in Spain. Through a series of case studies this dissertation problematizes the issue of modernism in art and fills an important gap in the study of the critical role of nationalism for the struggle between tradition and modernity in the arts in early twentieth-century Spain. Chapter One examines Zuloaga's influence in France through his affiliation with a group of French artists known as La Bande Noire and describes his important contribution to the rediscovery of El Greco in the last years of the nineteenth century. Chapter Two explores Zuloaga's discovery of the province of Castilla in 1898 as a subject for his work. It charts the significance of Castilla for the nationalist project of the Generation of 98 as well as for the regenerationist Institución Libre de Enseñanza (Free Institute of Learning). Chapter Three maps the growing links between Zuloaga and traditionalist and fascist ideologies, both in France and in Spain, in the 1910s and 1920s. Chapter Four investigates Zuloaga's career both in the context of the foundation and fall of Spain's Second Republic (1931-1939) and the Spanish Civil War and its aftermath. Zuloaga's career provides a significant case study for the gradual alignment, of what became traditionalism, with right-wing political ideology, an alignment by no means necessarily apparent before the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936.Item The Intersection Between Nationalism and Religion: The Burghers of Calais of Auguste Rodin(2009) Lee, Jung-Sil; Hargrove, June Ellen; Art History and Archaeology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)As a republican, Auguste Rodin (1840-1917) conveyed political ideology in his public sculpture, but due to his interest in religion and spirituality, his interpretations differed from contemporary artists. He grafted national myths and symbols onto Catholicism and its rituals to facilitate the sacralization of the Republic. Yet, the tension between Catholicism and republicanism in his work persisted because of his religiosity and his adherence to secularism. Rodin's conflict and compromise between the two fields were not only his personal dilemma, but also that of the Third Republic. This dissertation focuses on how Rodin internalized republican ideology in his public sculpture, and how he appropriated Catholic ritual to promote political messages. In spite of the republican government's constant struggle to separate from Catholic domination, Catholicism was so deeply imbedded in French culture, Rodin recognized this complex paradigm which he co-opted to construct an ideological matrix for his public work. Aware of the powerful social role of religion, the First Republic tried to create a new religion based on deistic tradition, The Cult of Supreme Being, to unite all French people who were severely divided by factions, languages, and regionalism. This precedent tradition further proved the importance of religion's social reach in constructing national sentiment. Based on research in Rodin museums in Paris and Meudon in 2004 and 2006, this study examines how Rodin merged Catholic practices and contemporary social ideologies into the fiber of nationalist identity that served to reconcile political oppositions in France and to heal wounded civic pride after the French defeat in the Franco-Prussian War. Similar to the public sphere proposed by Jürgen Habermas, Rodin's public sculpture suggests ideal democratic communicative field. The Burghers of Calais is a prime example of the republican ideal of heroic martyrdom. At the same time, its overall form, figural arrangement, and poignant expressions invoke the Catholic practice of pilgrimage, drawing the audience into the scene's emotional landscape. This interpretation of The Burghers of Calais as a religious and psychological catharsis paves the way for public sculpture to function as a healing tool to rebuild personal and national subjectivity.Item In the Graces of His Highness the Grand Duke: Caravaggio's Roman Patron Del Monte as a Florentine Courtier and Agent(2009) Ladino, Marie Jacquelin; Colantuono, Anthony; Art History and Archaeology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)While Cardinal Francesco Maria del Monte is celebrated as Caravaggio's first major patron in Rome, his primary activities at the turn of the seventeenth century were, in reality, centered much more around his role as a courtier and an artistic agent working on behalf of Ferdinando I de' Medici, the Grand Duke of Tuscany. In order to further the grand duke's propagandistic agenda for himself and his state, the cardinal, from his position in Rome, advised Ferdinando on opportunities to buy and commission works of art. He also gave gifts to the sovereign, such as Caravaggio's Medusa, always with the grand duke's artistic aims in mind. Del Monte should indeed be thought of as a patron of the arts; however, his relationship with the Florentine court sheds light on an essential but perhaps understudied position within the mechanism of Italian patronage--that of the agent who works on behalf of another.Item 'A world of trouble': Joseph Wright of Derby in Bath, 1775-1777(2009) Fox, Abram Jacob; Pressly, William; Art History and Archaeology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Between November 1775 and June 1777, Joseph Wright of Derby (1734-1797) spent two social `seasons' in the resort town of Bath. Shortly after returning from two years in Rome, Wright left Derby with his new wife and child in hopes of becoming the premier portrait painter in Bath, filling the void left by Thomas Gainsborough's departure the previous year. Rather than achieving success, Wright found himself ill-equipped for the complex social interactions of his new city and severely wanting for commissions. In light of Wright's professional failure in Bath, particularly contrasted with the artist's highly successful 1768-1771 Liverpool period, the Bath period has become a forgotten episode in critical literature on Wright. This thesis examines Wright's life during those two years, collecting for the first time all of his published Bath works and correspondence and exploring the dramatic effects of the experience on his career.Item Changing Evaluations of the Four Wangs During 20th-Century China(2009) Wang, Xingkui; Kuo, Jason; Art History and Archaeology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This thesis examines the receptions of the Four Wangs during the Republican Period (1911 - 1949) and the People's Republic Period (1949 - present). Twentieth century China has witnessed great changes in its cultural landscape. With new ideas and technologies from the West, traditional Chinese painting has been reevaluated, and sometimes rejected. The Four Wangs of the Early Qing dynasty, seen as the last great achievement of Chinese painting in the literati tradition before the twentieth century, are under fierce debate. Whether the Four Wangs have any genuine creative achievement or are they mere imitators of the ancient masters is one of the central issues. But the debate on the Four Wangs also concerns greater cultural issues, such as whether China should embrace the Western realistic style in art in order to revolutionize Chinese painting. This thesis examines the evaluations of the Four Wangs and pays close attention to the opinions of prominent figures such as Kang Youwei, Chen Duxiu, Cai Yuanpei, Teng Gu, Chen Shizeng, Fu Baoshi, Hu Peiheng, Yu Jianhua, Huang Binhong, Xu Beihong, Tong Shuye, Wang Bomin, Nie Chongzheng, etc. By examining these figures' opinions of the Four Wangs, this thesis hopes to investigate the historical context of each argument, and identify the strategies each one employs to convince the opposing side.