Art History & Archaeology Theses and Dissertations
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Item Andrea Sansovino and the Question of Modernism in Sixteenth-Century Italian Art(2015) Langer, Lara R.; Gill, Meredith J; Art History and Archaeology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation examines major artworks by the Tuscan artist Andrea Sansovino (c.1467/70-1529), and his role in the development of sculpture at the turn of the sixteenth century. Sansovino worked from the 1490s until his death in 1529, specializing in large tombs and altars. Amid a growing population of wealthy ecclesiastics, some chose to promote their legacies with grand funerary chapels and memorials. Displays of wealth and power went hand in hand with ritual, performance, and spectacle. The goal of this study is to establish how intersections among sculpture, funerary design, and cultural developments during the papacy of Julius II (r.1503-13) brought forth innovations in the art of Sansovino, which influenced his contemporaries and later artists. Establishing Sansovino as a pioneering artist will challenge previous scholarship classifying him as a typical promoter of fifteenth-century Florentine artistic traditions. To investigate the aesthetic of Sansovino, this discussion avoids the strict categorizations “classical” or “modern,” which may limit our understanding of his exceptionality. Under the methodological framework of social art history, considering artistic practice, collaboration, patronage, and ritual, this study gives special attention to Sansovino’s masterpieces, the twin tombs at Santa Maria del Popolo in Rome. Sansovino’s approach to tomb design and sculpted altarpieces is apparent in his rethinking of wall monuments, the importance of the body in his designs, and his reinvention of classical ornamentation. Analysis of Sansovino’s works offers a nuanced comparison of his art with the works of his colleagues. Chapter One introduces Sansovino and the historical context within which he lived and worked. Chapter Two explores Sansovino’s attributed altarpieces and early influences. Chapter Three focuses on the Popolo tombs as the embodiments of Sansovino’s interest in large-scale complex monuments and their role in the celebration of art and ceremony. Chapter Four highlights Sansovino’s participation in the massive marble screen of the Santa Casa at Loreto Cathedral, and argues that Sansovino devised the barrier as a more integrated part of the church and the congregant’s acts of devotion. Chapter Five reflects on those artists who followed Sansovino’s ambitious formal experiments in tomb and altar production.Item Lying with the Saints: Heavenly Bodies and Earthly Bodies in the Succorpo of San Gennaro(2011) Riesenberger, Nicole Joy; Gill, Meredith J; Art History and Archaeology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In January 1497, when the powerful Carafa family translated the relics of San Gennaro, patron saint of Naples, to the city's cathedral, a devastating plague that had ravished the region is said to have immediately ceased. The presence and miraculous power of the saint's relics give meaning to the Succorpo, Cardinal Oliviero Carafa's funerary chapel in the cathedral. This magnificent foundation serves two functions: first, it is the private funerary chapel of Carafa and select members of his family; second, it is the locus of the cult of San Gennaro himself. My thesis examines the chapel's dual functions and explores the iconography of its decoration. I present new propositions regarding the architectural plan and artistic attributions of the chapel, and I provide a close reading of the portrait sculpture of Cardinal Carafa in the Succorpo, considering how its strategic placement informs our understanding of the program and its meaning.Item The Old New World: Unearthing Mesoamerican Antiquity in the Art of the United States, 1839-1893(2010) George, Angela; Promey, Sally M.; Art History and Archaeology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Through a series of case studies, this dissertation examines how and why artists in the United States imagined Mesoamerican antiquity between 1839 and 1893. The artists whose work I consider most closely include Frederick Catherwood, Peter F. Rothermel, Emanuel Leutze, George Martin Ottinger, and George de Forest Brush; works by other artists play supporting roles or amplify the observations made in this project. The decades in which I situate my study were key in the development of the United States' geographic borders and national identity as well as in the foundation of archaeological investigation in Mesoamerica. During the period under question, ancient Mesoamerica provided a "usable past" for many in the United States. Since little was known of the pre-Hispanic cultures of the region, Mesoamerican antiquity served as a palimpsest upon which a number of narratives could be written. As this dissertation reveals, ancient Mesoamerica resonated differently with various individuals and groups in the United States. The Mesoamerica that existed in the U.S. imagination was at once savage, exotic, advanced, and primitive, inhabited by a population assigned a similarly disparate and ultimately contradictory range of traits. Representations of Mesoamerica were not fixed but eminently variable, shaped to serve the exigencies of many historical moments. As such, these images reveal as much about the nineteenth-century United States as they do about the people and places depicted. Ultimately, I demonstrate that these images conveyed multivalent and often ambivalent attitudes about Mesoamerica, views that emphasized the importance of the Mesoamerican past as well as the presumed preeminence of the United States' future.Item Synthesizing Transcendental Painting: Race, Religion, and Aesthetics in the Art of Emil Bisttram, Raymond Jonson, and Agnes Pelton(2010) Rees, Nathan; Promey, Sally M.; Art History and Archaeology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Three core artists of the Transcendental Painting Group, Emil Bisttram (1895-1976), Raymond Jonson (1891-1982), and Agnes Pelton (1881-1961), employed modernist painting styles in an attempt to create spiritually significant art. Although previous scholarship has focused on the artists' formal innovations, their work was imbricated in contemporary cultural politics, actively participating in discourses surrounding conceptions of race, religion, aesthetics, and the interrelation of each of these realms. Each drew from sources in metaphysical religious literature, especially Theosophy and related traditions. Their theories of ideal aesthetics for religious art, based on the supposition that artists could convey direct emotional experience through abstraction, reflected the Theosophical drive to overcome materialist philosophy by transcending the limits of physicality. Bisttram, Pelton, and Jonson also internalized Theosophy's promotion of syncretism as a guiding principle, and followed metaphysical religionists in advocating a combinative appropriation from diverse religious and artistic traditions. In particular, they relied on Theosophical conceptions of the importance of gleaning allegedly ancient wisdom as they addressed American Indian cultures of the Southwest. Their art created a hybrid iconography, combining symbolic elements from metaphysical religious sources with imagery derived from Southwest Indian cultures, asserting an integral relationship between the two, and advancing the perceived agreement between Native American and Theosophical religious systems as evidence of the truth of the latter. In addition to expressing metaphysical interpretations of Native American religions in their work, they promoted a transcultural aesthetic that posited American Indian art as an archaic and therefore "authentic" means of expressing of spiritual wisdom; they modeled their own abstract aesthetics in response to their encounters with Indian art. As they appropriated from Native American sources, they created images that celebrated the indigenous peoples of the Southwest as possessing unique and important religious knowledge. Their intent, however, was to advance Western culture forward by drawing from ancient sources to create a new, synthetic religion. The result was an art that referenced American Indian cultural practices and art traditions, but gave no voice to the original Native American artists, claiming to transcend the sphere of cultural significance and approach the level of "universal" meaning.Item "The Imagery of the Ear:" Listening and Sound in American Art, 1847-1897(2010) Naeem, Asma; Promey, Sally M; Art History and Archaeology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)America's soundscape underwent tremendous changes from the mid-nineteenth century on: not only in terms of the telegraph, telephone, and phonograph, but also with the noises heard in the city streets, factories, and countryside nearby. During this period, Winslow Homer, Thomas Eakins, and Thomas Wilmer Dewing explored the intersection of auditory experience and artistic production, creating complex works that gave visual form to the changing nature of sound and listening. All three painters pursued the representation of aurality as career-long endeavors, and developed distinct approaches and pictorial syntaxes. Homer, whose life and artistic outlook were marked by his experience as a traveling Civil War illustrator, painted the everyday sounds of laborers in the American countryside and out at sea in terms of issues related to distance and signaling over space. At a time when a growing number of people were communicating with one another with the aid of such machines as the telegraph and telephone, Homer's long-distance aural exchanges probe the human desire for connectivity, and its converse, separation. Eakins piques our aural imagination with the physiognomic and sartorial acuities of his musicians and singers, not to mention the mimeticism of their actions, and attempts to pack the parallel visual and aural experiences of realism tightly into his paintings, despite the limits of the medium. Transferring his photographic experiments of stopping the human body in mid-motion to the painterly stopping of musical sound in mid-song, Eakins's works evince his personal form of transcription. Whereas Eakins sought to unify the eye, ear, and hand in one split second of representation, Dewing sought to fragment aural moments to pictorialize the psychic effects of listening, and promote the vaults of the imagination. Most notably through attenuated sonic transmissions and the idea of pause, Dewing's representations of women in airless domestic interiors and atmospheric landscapes frequently evince a "pulling apart" of sight and sound that render his depictions of music and speech strangely quiet and unsettling. At the same time, these suspended aural scenarios help to cabin the women he so often portrayed.Item Figurative Constructivism, Pictorial Statistics, and the Group of Progressive Artists, c. 1920-1939(2010) Benus, Benjamin; Mansbach, Steven A.; Art History and Archaeology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation examines an episode of interdisciplinary collaboration in Vienna during the late 1920s and early 1930s, led by the Austrian social scientist Otto Neurath (1882-1945) and the German printmaker Gerd Arntz (1900-1988). This collaboration, which took place at Vienna's Gesellschafts- und Wirtschaftsmuseum [Social and Economic Museum] ultimately created an international graphic sign language that would have wide-ranging applications across a variety of media and disciplines. Known as the Vienna Method of Pictorial Statistics, this graphic language was intended to communicate social and economic facts to a general audience. In making such information broadly accessible, the Vienna Method's designers hoped to empower the public at large to take informed positions on a variety of social and political issues. Prior to and during the period of this collaboration, Arntz was a member of the Rhineland-based Gruppe progressiver Künstler [Group of Progressive Artists]. In 1929 two additional members of this group—the Dutch artist Peter Alma (1886-1969) and the Czech artist Augustin Tschinkel (1905-1983)—joined Arntz at the museum. All three artists produced prints, drawings, and paintings in an expressive mode, later classified under the rubric "figurative constructivism." While these "free" works (as they often described them) were produced independent of the applied work at the museum, the two types of production share several key stylistic and iconographic features. Yet, the relationship between figurative constructivist artworks and pictorial statistic graphics has until now remained obscure. This dissertation analyzes the nature of this creative relationship by describing the different circumstances out of which the two projects originated, and by examining the manner in which certain figurative constructivist features were adapted in the design of pictorial statistics. In considering the ways in which these two types of work were presented and discussed together in a variety of contemporaneous avant-garde publications, the present investigation will provide new insights concerning the interwar connections between the artistic avant-garde and visual communication in the sciences.Item Performing the New Face of Modernism: Anti-Mimetic Portraiture and the American Avant-Garde, 1912-1927(2010) Walz, Jonathan Frederick; Promey, Sally M.; Art History and Archaeology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)At the Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession in 1912, Alfred Stieglitz received the final proofs for Gertrude Stein's experimental text portraits "Henri Matisse" and "Pablo Picasso" and subsequently published these poems in the journal Camera Work. Soon afterward a number of visual artists working in the United States began grappling with the implications of such hermetic depictions. Entering into a trans-Atlantic conversation, this fledgling modernist community created radical images that bear witness to the evolving nature of subjectivity and to an extensive culture of experimentation in portraying the individual in the first quarter of the twentieth century. One of the most salient aspects of the modernist worldview was the desire to break with the past. Earlier styles, exhibition standards, subject matter, and teaching methods all came under attack, but none more basic - and symbolic - than the ancient Greek (via the Renaissance) idea of mimesis. Freed from the expectation to replicate reality "impartially," painters and sculptors began instead to emphasize more and more their own subjective experiences through expressive color choices or formal exaggerations. Portraiture, previously so closely linked to flattering transcription and bourgeois values, became the genre par excellence for testing modernist ideals and practices. This doctoral thesis examines the small group of artists working in the United States who advanced an extreme, anti-mimetic approach to portraiture through the dissociation of the sitter from his or her likeness. Drawing on performance theory, this dissertation re-imagines the portrait as a series of events within a social nexus. It also aims to reaffirm the agency of the United States avant-garde in the 1910s and 1920s as its members sought to establish, and then maintain, their status on the American cultural scene specifically through the employment of unconventional portraiture. Through the contextualization of particular objects, the consideration of period poetry, and the incorporation of newly available archival sources, the research presented here illuminates the complex intersections of modernity, representation, and subjectivity, and charts the changes in a specific mode of visual production during the fifteen-year span of 1912 - 1927, thereby demonstrating Charles Demuth's dictum that "In portraiture...likeness is a means not an end."Item Luo Qing's Paintings of Post-Industrial Taiwan and Their Incompatibility with Guohua(2010) Wang, Jen-Yu; Kuo, Jason; Art History and Archaeology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This thesis examines the career and artwork of Luo Qing in the context of past artistic movements and current academic discourse. Using Luo Qing and his work as a point of departure, this thesis aims to combine diachronic and synchronic concerns in the arts, specifically art that is made in the medium of ink. Luo Qing is famous for his inventive style in poetry and ink paintings. The two bodies of work selected,"Here Comes the UFO" and "Asphalt Road", not only exemplify his creative spirit in redefining ink art, they also establish him as a member of the modern Chinese literati, a scholar artist, in Taiwan. Both series were Luo's ongoing projects in the 1980s and the 1990s. A conflict between the traditional and the new was present in Chinese politics and culture at the time, and this tension affected the creative community. The dynamics between Chinese imperial history and modern Chinese industry is the subject of most of Luo's work. He creatively portrayed conflicts between traditional Chinese heritage and contemporary Western commercialism. "Here Comes the UFO"and " Asphalt Road" both depict the modern subject of industrialization in traditional Chinese ink painting format. Luo Qing's novel way of approaching Chinese artistic traditions, both in painting and poetry, validated its importance as a new paradigm. Luo's artistic world depicted in these two bodies of work was representative of a tumultuous era in Chinese history that took place not in China, but in Taiwan. In stark contrast, the current academic discourse on ink art originated in China and quickly spread through the research of Chinese scholars, most of whom work in North American academia. Compelling debates on ink art's importance and passionate proclamation associating ink art with Chinese nationhood are popular subjects. These subjects, however, are distant and irrelevant to Luo's early cityscapes. The contemporary paradigm may ignore why Luo Qing came to international fame. The first part of this thesis profiles Luo's two bodies of work and provides a comprehensive survey of his training and inspiration from the past. The second part connects these works with a thorough overview of scholarship on contemporary ink art. Using Luo's work as an intersecting point of reference, I hope to revive Luo Qing's significance to the Chinese art community and address specific, larger issues concerning contemporary theories on ink art.Item 'Me and My Circle': James Ensor in the Twentieth Century(2010) Kula, Katherine; Hargrove, June; Art History and Archaeology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)At the time of his death in 1949, Belgian artist James Ensor (b. 1860) had already garnered decades of acclaim for his bold, expressionistic use of color and outlandish scenes that frequently featured his favored motifs of masks and skeletons. Such images, produced largely in the 1880s and 1890s, are to this day considered Ensor's most 'creative.' Although he generated a remarkably large and diverse body of work between the turn of the century and the end of his life, these later images are left largely unconsidered in scholarship on the artist. Here, by approaching Ensor's twentieth-century body of work as an inextricable piece of the artist's entire oeuvre, and by juxtaposing the 'early' and 'late' Ensors, I will examine how the altered artistic path Ensor took in the twentieth century is symptomatic of larger changes occurring in his life.Item THE ARCHITECTURAL VESSELS OF THE MOCHE OF PERU (C.E. 200-850): ARCHITECTURE FOR THE AFTERLIFE(2010) Wiersema, Juliet Benham; Pillsbury, Joanne; Venit, Marjorie; Art History and Archaeology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation investigates sculpted representations of ritual architecture produced by the Moche (C.E. 200-850), a complex and socially-stratified society occupying Peru's north coast centuries before the formation of the Inca Empire. My study focuses on a single artifact type--the Moche architectural vessel--a portable fine ware ceramic container with a stirrup-shaped handle and straight spout which supports a miniature modeled building. Moche architectural vessels mimic the form of structures and features identified in full-scale Moche architecture. When discovered archaeologically, these objects accompany elite burials found within or in close proximity to Moche ritual architecture, or huacas. For art historians and archaeologists, these portable artifacts constitute one of the most important sources of data on Moche ritual architecture and as such, permit us a more nuanced understanding of ancient ceremonial structures which have been compromised by centuries of erosion, treasure hunting, and cataclysmic events. While Moche architectural vessels have been considered simple and somewhat generic representations of temples or temple complexes, my study suggests these objects instead relay explicit information about geographically, temporally, or ideologically specific ritual structures. In this dissertation, I propose a practical method for "decoding" these objects and demonstrate that, once deciphered, Moche architectural vessels can elucidate the original form, function, and ideological significance of Moche ceremonial architecture. My research draws upon several disciplines including art history, anthropology, ethnography, and ethnomusicology. Important contributions include the assembly of the first Moche architectural vessel corpus (169 vessels), the creation of a detailed 10-type Moche architectural vessel typology, a new method for visualizing these objects, and the discovery that several vessels are additionally acoustic artifacts. My study presents a new investigative model, applicable to other areas in the ancient Andes and Mesoamerica, where, for millennia, ceramic representations of architecture formed an important part of burial ritual. Moche architectural vessels also engage in a cross-cultural dialogue with architectural representations made for burial by other ancient cultures around the globe, including Han Dynasty China, Middle Kingdom Egypt, Iron Age Italy, Ancient West Mexico, and Aztec Mexico. They also illuminate the rich potential of ceremonial objects made by advanced societies without text-based histories.