Art History & Archaeology Theses and Dissertations

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    GAUGUIN'S NOA NOA: ASPECTS OF NARRATIVE IN TEXT AND IMAGE
    (1991) Day, Amy Elizabeth; Hargrove, June
    Paul Gauguin's novel Noa Noa is a fictionalized account of his first Tahitian journey. The artist planned to combine his text with ten woodblock prints, now known as the Noa Noa Suite; and he began working on both the text and the images in 1893. The two works were never printed together in the same volume, and no information has been found concerning the placement of images with text. There has been no investigation of the relationship between these images and the written story they were meant to accompany. This thesis attempts to establish a functional relationship between Gauguin's images and his text and to explore the many different narrative levels employed in Noa Noa. Both the text and the images are examined alone to determine how each functions separately as a narrative. Then, when examining the two forms together, the images are each found to connect with a specific textual passage -- a passage almost always containing references to Gauguin's previous works. This association between text and image creates an entirely new narrative. It is proven that, when writing about his painting, Gauguin created a discourse between image and text that contains a multi-layered reference to himself as a creator. Finally, it is shown that Gauguin combined this intermedia narrative with other, more universal narratives to elevate his own position as a creator.
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    King of the Renaissance: Art and Politics at the Neapolitan Court of Ferrante I, 1458-1494
    (2016) Riesenberger, Nicole Joy; Gill, Meredith J.; Art History and Archaeology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    In the second half of the fifteenth century, King Ferrante I of Naples (r. 1458-1494) dominated the political and cultural life of the Mediterranean world. His court was home to artists, writers, musicians, and ambassadors from England to Egypt and everywhere in between. Yet, despite its historical importance, Ferrante’s court has been neglected in the scholarship. This dissertation provides a long-overdue analysis of Ferrante’s artistic patronage and attempts to explicate the king’s specific role in the process of art production at the Neapolitan court, as well as the experiences of artists employed therein. By situating Ferrante and the material culture of his court within the broader discourse of Early Modern art history for the first time, my project broadens our understanding of the function of art in Early Modern Europe. I demonstrate that, contrary to traditional assumptions, King Ferrante was a sophisticated patron of the visual arts whose political circumstances and shifting alliances were the most influential factors contributing to his artistic patronage. Unlike his father, Alfonso the Magnanimous, whose court was dominated by artists and courtiers from Spain, France, and elsewhere, Ferrante differentiated himself as a truly Neapolitan king. Yet Ferrante’s court was by no means provincial. His residence, the Castel Nuovo in Naples, became the physical embodiment of his commercial and political network, revealing the accretion of local and foreign visual vocabularies that characterizes Neapolitan visual culture.
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    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.
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    Empowering Images: Negotiating the Identity of Authority through Material Culture in the Hellenistic East, 140-38 BCE
    (2014) Hwang, HyoSil Suzy; Venit, Marjorie S; Art History and Archaeology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    During the late-second to first century BCE, Tigranes II the Great of Armenia (140-55 BCE), Antiochos I Theos of Commagene (ca. 86-38 BCE), and Mithridates VI Eupator of Pontus (134-63 BCE) employed multivalent imagery to legitimize their positions and assert their authority amid the changing political landscape of the Hellenistic East. Each king's visual program shaped and reflected the political dynamics of his reign, the mixed cultural identity of his population, and the threats posed by foreign powers. As the kings negotiated their positions within an environment rife with military conflict and in territories composed of multi-ethnic populations, they created nuanced visual programs that layered ties to multiple historic precedents and religious authorities. Each king's program intended to communicate differently to diverse audiences - both foreign and domestic - while simultaneously asserting the king's position as the ruler of a powerful and unified realm. This dissertation considers the rulers' creation and dissemination of such imagery, revealing new dimensions of ruling ideologies and visual culture in the Late Hellenistic East.
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    Forging a New World Nationalism: Ancient Mexico in United States Art and Visual Culture, 1933-1945
    (2012) Robertson, Breanne; Ater, Renee; Promey, Sally M; Art History and Archaeology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    Between 1933 and 1945, Americans redefined their cultural identity within a hemispheric context and turned toward Mexican antiquity to invent a non-European national mythos. This reconfiguration of ancient Mexican history and culture coincided with changes in U.S. foreign policy regarding Latin American nations. In his inaugural address on March 4, 1933, President Franklin Roosevelt launched the Good Neighbor Policy, hoping to build an international alliance with Latin American countries that would safeguard the Western hemisphere from the political and economic crises in Europe. As part of these efforts, the government celebrated Mesoamerican civilization as evidence of a great hemispheric heritage belonging also to United States citizens. These historical circumstances altered earlier American views of ancient Mexico as simultaneously a preindustrial paradise of noble savages and an uncivilized site of idolatry, revolution, and human sacrifice. My dissertation examines this official reinterpretation of American past and present reality under the Good Neighbor Policy. Specifically, I consider the portrayal of ancient Mexico in United States art as a symbol of pan-American identity in order to map the ideological contours of U.S. diplomacy and race relations. The chapters of the dissertation present a series of case studies, each devoted to a different facet of the international discourse of U.S.-led pan-Americanism as it was internally conceived and domestically disseminated. Specifically, I examine the works of four American artists: Lowell Houser, Donal Hord, Charles White, and Jean Charlot. This ethnically and regionally diverse group of artists, whose art production ranged from sculpture to mural art to children's book illustrations, reveals the broad scope of the discursive apparatus restructuring North American perceptions of Latin America during this period. My analysis investigates the pictorial strategies of hemispheric identity formation; the domestic limitations of the Good Neighbor Policy as demonstrated in the clash of local and global politics; the agitation for equal recognition and full rights of citizenship among minority groups in the United States; and, finally, the international limitations of U.S.-led pan-Americanism as evidenced by persistent racism and U.S. cultural hegemony in hemispheric affairs.
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    Nou La, We Here: Remembrance and Power in the Arts of Haitian Vodou
    (2007-11-27) Brice, Leslie Anne; Promey, Sally M.; Art History and Archaeology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    Haitian Vodou is vast, accumulative, and constantly in flux, drawing from many sources and traditions as it adapts to changes in the world, as well as to the needs and imaginations of its adherents. With its origins in west and central Africa, along with the strategies for transformation that are at the heart of many religions there, Vodou developed into its current form as a response to forced transatlantic migration, enslavement, encounters with Amerindian traditions, Catholicism, Freemasonry, the complications that emerged in the quest for liberty, the consequences of a successful slave revolt, and the establishment of an independent state. It is largely the last three points that contribute to Vodou's strong military ethos, and with that, Vodou's focus on liberation. Based on field research between 2000 and 2004, in Washington, D.C. and in Haiti, this dissertation examines Vodou visual arts in relation to Haiti's revolutionary history, and how the arts articulate related themes of militarism, liberation, and resistance. Central to this study is remembrance, or the active and purposeful remembering of diverse lived experiences that practitioners evoke, express, and promote through visual and performing arts. Remembrance includes the historical, socioeconomic, political, and sacred realities that shape Vodou practice today and thereby provides a larger context for interpreting visual expressions. Equally important to this interpretation is the sacred world, which includes the spirits, the ancestors, and Vodou cosmological principles. Along the lines of remembrance and the sacred world, this dissertation examines the sacred spaces, altars, and power objects that practitioners create with their own aesthetic sensibilities and cosmological interpretations. It considers how practitioners actively remember and engage the past to empower themselves and their communities in the present. By weaving together the historical, social, the political, and the cosmological, along with an emphasis on practitioner agency, this dissertation underscores the transatlantic scope of Vodou visual creations. In doing so, it brings into focus just how pragmatic this religion and its objects are, and suggests how visuality offers people a sense of self-determinism in their lives.
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    Art as Lived Religion: Edward Burne-Jones as Painter, Priest, Pilgrim, and Monk
    (2007-04-25) Crossman, Colette M.; Pressly, William L; Art History and Archaeology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    This dissertation presents the first analysis of religion in the life and work of the artist Edward Burne-Jones (1833-98) and establishes its centrality to his creative practice, identity, and reception. As a young man, he dreamed of taking holy orders and founding a monastic brotherhood. After forgoing the priesthood, he ornamented countless churches as an ecclesiastical designer and maintained a proclivity for painting Christian iconography, leading contemporaries to proclaim him one of the world's great religious artists. Today, however, using an outmoded lens that characterizes the nineteenth century as a period of precipitous religious decline, most art historians assume Burne-Jones reflects the conventional narrative of lost faith and doubt. Confusing institutional affiliation with personal belief, they have overlooked his unorthodox views, which defy the customary parameters of denomination or broad, theological movement, yet signal an ongoing, complex spiritual commitment. Moreover, misperceiving the secular as a necessary condition of modernity, some have expunged the religious from his art in an anxiety to legitimize his place in the modernist canon. Methodologies of lived religion and practice, however, offer a new means of understanding Burne-Jones. Reconsidering belief as something often expressed beyond the confines of corporate worship and creed, as behaviors and discursive patterns occupying spaces of vocation, creativity, identity, and the everyday, demonstrates that art served as a vehicle for enacting his spiritual convictions. In the overlapping, and at times conflicting, guises of a priest mediating the divine, an artist-monk for whom labor is a devotional act, and a pilgrim seeking salvation, Burne-Jones cast his artistic practice as a religious vocation meant to improve the world through the redemptive power of beauty and, in the process, secure divine favor. In addition to explicating the religious role art-making served for Burne-Jones, this project seeks to reclaim his altarpieces' liturgical functions and reconstruct how Christian audiences adapted and consumed his art for various didactic and devotional purposes. Such analysis underscores his objects' multivalency and the subjectivity of sacredness. Consequently, Burne-Jones's example provides evidence that religion was not necessarily disappearing in the Victorian age, but was being transformed and exercised in increasingly personalized ways.