21: Inquiries into Art, History, and the Visual

Animal-Shaped Masks in Sixteenth-Century Italian Sculpture, Architecture and Armour

Caroline van Eck — 2024-10-07

In sixteenth-century Florence a variety of sculptural or architectural ornament was developed in the shape of animal masks, often featuring several animals or parts of different animals in one object, and the presence of eyes half hidden behind the surface mask. Michelangelo’s New Sacristy is a main locus for the development of these ornaments, but they soon spread over the city. Although sixteenth-century viewers called them “grotesques”, they differ from the two-dimensional variety inspired by the Domus Aurea because they consistently use strange, hybrid animal features that are not part of the repertoire of mythological hybrid beasts such as griffins, commonly used in grotesques inspired by the Roman tradition. They also stand out because they share these animal features with parade and tournament armour of the same period. Their formal characteristics, as well as their similarity to the ornament of contemporary parade armour, little studied until now, raises many questions about their origins, meaning, circumstances of creation and use, and possible impact. These ornaments also share many formal and compositional features with the masks made in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by the peoples of the Northwest Coast of North America. They share a duplication or triplication of animal shapes, the presence of eyes behind the mask, incrustation and other graphical patterns, and a particular patterning, or spreading, of animal features across the object they cover. The central question this article seeks to address is therefore: is it possible to develop an approach to these masks, both Italian and North American, that can suggest a common ground, in form, function, impact, or sets of beliefs that drove their creation and use? The analysis of Northwestern Coast mask design by Franz Boas, Claude Lévi-Strauss and Philippe Descola will serve, first, as an instrument to better understand the composition of sixteenth-century animal-shaped masks, because they make the viewer aware of aspects of their design that remain under the radar in traditional stylistic or iconographical interpretation. Second, the similarities between these two groups of artefacts will point to shared sets of beliefs in nature as a source of endless transformation, and in the fundamental kinship of humans and animals.

Michael Snijders's Copious Copies and the Mechanisms of Print

Aaron M. Hyman — 2024-10-07

Between around 1630 and 1640, the little-studied printmaker Michael Snijders engraved an idiosyncratic series likely consisting of at least twenty-two prints. Approximating the logics of both drawing manual and sketchbook, the series brings together head studies, limbs, flora, fauna, antique costume, and fantastical creatures. Almost every one of these myriad motifs is copied from another source and staged – over the course of multiple, radically altered states – to produce a delightful play on the entwined concepts of copy and copiousness for artists and increasingly attentive connoisseurs. As this essay argues, Snijders’s series thus amounts to an intensive commentary on the mechanisms of print as a medium and, through this, on the history of early modern art and the status of the “copy” within it.

A Postcolonial Perspective on Aleksandr Deineka’s Donbas Images

Marina Gerber — 2024-10-07

This article analyses both well-known and unfamiliar paintings, illustrations and mosaics depicting the Ukrainian Donbas region by the Socialist Realist artist Aleksandr Deineka (1899–1969). Having been received, because of his modernism, rather sympathetically in the West, Deineka produced an array of Donbas images that can be employed as a starting point for analysing Soviet imperial ideology in art. The case of Deineka shows the extent of Soviet imperial and colonial strategies in regard to nations that were subjected to Moscow’s rule, and that even Deineka, who is considered as a critical Socialist Realist, was one of the most powerful ideologues of Soviet colonial imperialism.

Within the Fabric of Public Space

Leena Crasemann — 2024-10-07

The debate on decolonizing monuments has provoked a great deal of covering and shrouding of public sculptures. This paper looks at three examples and shows how textile interventions alter a monument’s visibility and, as products of (post)colonial trade or communal handicraft, add semantic layers. Ranging from The Kudzu Project’s marking of Confederate monuments in Charlottesville, VA, through the covering of the Robert Milligan statue by protesters in London, to a curated artwork by Joiri Minaya in Hamburg, the examples span both geographical regions and the recent history of the debate. The paper proposes that textile ephemerality questions concepts of history embedded in the traditional materiality of public sculptures and provides a model for imagining other practices of commemoration.

Jeffrey Moser, Nominal Things. Bronzes in the Making of Medieval China

Phillip Grimberg — 2024-10-07

Nancy Shatzman Steinhardt, Yuan. Chinese Architecture in a Mongol Empire

Denise Patry Leidy — 2024-10-07

Yi Song-mi, Recording State Rites in Words and Images. Uigwe of Joseon Korea

Burglind Jungmann — 2024-10-07

Johanna Spanke, Photomurals. Fotografische Wandbilder in transnationalen Aushandlungsprozessen zwischen Mexiko und den USA

Angela Lammert — 2024-10-07