Theses and Dissertations from UMD

Permanent URI for this communityhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2

New submissions to the thesis/dissertation collections are added automatically as they are received from the Graduate School. Currently, the Graduate School deposits all theses and dissertations from a given semester after the official graduation date. This means that there may be up to a 4 month delay in the appearance of a give thesis/dissertation in DRUM

More information is available at Theses and Dissertations at University of Maryland Libraries.

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Author: search.filters.author.Cody, Steven Joseph

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    Andrea del Sarto (1486-1530) and the Art of Reform
    (2015) Cody, Steven Joseph; Gill, Meredith J; Art History and Archaeology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    During the second and third decades of the sixteenth century, Andrea del Sarto (1486-1530) distinguished himself within the city of Florence as a painter of considerable talent. He worked within a variety of religious institutions, creating altarpieces rich in theological complexity, elegant in formal execution, and dazzlingly brilliant in chromatic impact. This dissertation analyzes six of those altarpieces, offering a cross-section of Andrea's working life and stylistic development. Approaching the artist's career from this perspective provides modern audiences with a valuable glimpse into his strategies for marrying his own social ambitions to the spiritual teachings that informed ecclesiastical art. These strategies evolved as Andrea learned from each artistic commission he undertook, each altarpiece that he produced in dialogue with educated patrons and learned religious advisors. Over the course of his career, he himself privileged with increasing sophistication theological texts concerned with the idea of reform. I argue that Andrea's stylistic development as a painter describes this process of spiritual education. This argument reconsiders the established conventions of the art-historical monograph, as it adds significantly to the broader scholarly discussion of Renaissance religious art, shedding fresh light on early modern theories of subjectivity and sensation.
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    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.