Eloquent Images

Drawing on original research covering different periods and spaces, this book sets out to appreciate the specific place of images in the history of evangelisation in the long modern period. How can we reconceptualise the functions of the visual mediation of the gospel message, both in terms of the production and reception of this message and in terms of its effective mediators, artists, religious, and cultural ambassadors? The contributions in this book offer multiple geographical and historical insights regarding the circulation of the image on the global scale of the Christianised world or the world in the process of being Christianised, from China to Iberia. Combining the contribution of historians and art historians, the authors highlight the points of intercultural encounter and tension around preaching, catechesis, devotional practices and the propagandistic use of images. Through its aesthetic and social study of the image, and by examining the inner and outer borders of Europe and the mission lands, Eloquent Images contributes significantly to the history of evangelisation, one of the major dynamics of the first European globalisation.

‘We Are Gathering Experience’

In recent years, critics and art historians have pointed to an ‘educational turn’, a rise in participatory pedagogical art projects and artist-led experimental schools. This essay considers artist-led projects and museum programmes that restage or reenact educational experiments from the past, analysing their limits and possibilities in the study and presentation of modern art history. Much like performance art, pedagogy is ephemeral and contingent, and yet it differs in that it does not establish a fixed spectatorial role. To be understood it must be participated in, for, as Josef Albers described his teaching, ‘we are gathering experience’.

Tezauronimiczny „skarbczyk” sztucznej biżuterii. Kilka uwag o nazwach własnych „drugorzędnych klejnotów”

Imitation jewellery, also known as “secondary gems”, has been people’s companion from antiquity. Its representative objects, however, have rarely been assigned their individualised proper names – thesauronyms. As an answer to the appeal of Polish art historians and museologists: Ewa Letkiewicz, Katarzyna Kluczwajd, Monika Paś and Dorota Zahel, this study is an attempt at a linguistic and culturological presentation of thesauronyms that signify: a pair of earrings, collar, ring, fur fastener clip, necklaces, brooches, duette brooches, jewellery series, collections, lines, sets, limited edition. The attention is also drawn to the specificity of thesauronyms distinguishing similar jewellery items and thesauronyms denoting many various and completely different referents. Moreover, motivation analysis, semantic and motivation analysis, and structural analysis of the names of imitation jewellery names has been conducted. The findings allowed for redefining, verifying, supplementing and extending the term thesauronym.

Jan van Eyck’s New York Diptych: A New Reading on the Skeleton of the Great Chasm

The Crucifixion and Last Judgment, or the so-called New York Diptych, is one of the most controversial paintings attributed to Jan van Eyck (ca. 1390–1441) and his workshop. For well over a century, art historians have vigorously discussed its attribution, composition, functional intent, and even its dating. In light of prior scholarship addressing these remarkable panels, this paper focuses on the skeleton represented in the Last Judgment to reveal its iconographical meanings. Specifically, I highlight the inscriptions written on the skeleton’s wings, suggesting that the texts were cited from an All Saints’ Day sermon delivered by the Burgundian abbot Bernard of Clairvaux (1090–1153) who discussed a temporal location for blessed or sinful souls.

SCIENTIFIC AND EDUCATIONAL SEMINAR «WOMEN'S TRADI-TIONAL CULTURE AND COSTUME IN THE ERA OF THE MEDIE-VAL AND NEW TIME» AT THE HISTORICAL FACULTY OF TVGU

В сообщении характеризуется серия научно-образовательных семинаров «Женская традиционная культура и костюм в эпоху Средневековья и Новое время», проходивших на историческом факультете ТвГУ с 2010 по 2021 гг. Семинары объединили опытных и молодых исследователей - археологов, историков, искусствоведов, музеологов, реконструкторов России, Беларуси, Украины, Молдовы в изучении и обсуждении проблем формирования, эволюции, реконструкции исторического костюма различных территорий и эпох. Семинар получал поддержку Российского гуманитарного научного фонда. Материалы семинара опубликованы в трех выпусках одноименного сборника статей, индексируемого РИНЦ. В 2021 г. семинар объединил участников из учреждений науки, образования и культуры Москвы, Твери, Санкт-Петербурга, Ельца. The report describes a series of scientific and educational seminars «Women's traditional culture and costume in the Middle Ages and the New Time». They were held at the Faculty of History of Tver State University from 2010 to 2021. The seminars brought together experienced and young researchers - archaeologists, historians, art historians, museologists, reenactors from Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, Moldova in the study and discussion of the problems of formation, evolution, reconstruction of the historical costume of different territories and eras. The seminar was supported by the Russian Foundation for the Humanities. The materials of the seminar were published in three issues of the collection of articles of the same name, indexed by the RSCI. In 2021, the seminar brought together participants from institutions of science, education and culture of Moscow, Tver, St. Petersburg, Yelets.

Fake or Fortune? Alexander Dorner and the Weimar Reproductions Debate

Between 1929 and 1930 the Der Kreis journal hosted a debate among art historians and museum directors on how art copies were changing the museum landscape. The so-called Hamburger Faksimile-Streit constitutes a crucial moment in the Weimarian theoretical debate on the categories of copy and original, culminating a few years later in Benjamin’s well-known essay on the work of art. After examining the theses of the main participants in the debate, this article focus on the position of curator and museum director Alexander Dorner – the only one advocating for the non-superiority of originals over copies in art museums – and on his relationship with Walter Benjamin’s later theories.

The Landbound Chicken and the Deliberate Chameleon yet have their Uses: Yorùbá Art History, Language, and Interpretation.

Rowland Abiodun’s Yorùbá Art and Language contains many extremely valuable features, wrapped around a question he raises in its introduction: can foreign scholars ever truly understand a work the way its Yorùbá makers and users do? Language mastery certainly provides the native speaker with access to inestimable insights regarding not only general worldview, but specifics of philosophy, history keeping, and subtleties of knowledge transmission. However, in the attempt to read an artwork and unpack its meaning, cultural in[1]siders also face obstacles as well as advantages, particularly when pieces date from the more distant past. The import of Abiodun’s major contributions regarding Yorùbá art’s history and the validity of his contentions are considered here in light of the varied contributions both foreign and Yorùbá art historians bring to Yorùbá scholarship, in the recognition that working with art of bygone centuries makes all scholars outsiders to a degree. A kì í gbójú-u fífò lé adìẹ àgàgà; à kì í gbójú-u yíyan lé alágẹmọ. One should not expect the flightless chicken to soar; one should not expect the chameleon to stride. Can outsiders ever truly understand a work of art the way its makers and users do? In the introduction to his book Yorùbá Art and Language: Seeking the African in African Art, Rowland Abiodun concludes that only those with a mastery of the Yorùbá language and deep cultural familiarity can interpret Yorùbá artworks effectively. His argument produces numerous salie observations and the viewing framework he creates provides an exceedingly valuable set of lenses for interpreting Yorùbá sculpture. However, the question posed above remains intriguing, and is more complex than it appears. Even when an artist and his patron live in the same community at the same time, their interpretations of a commissioned work may not be identical, so when one moves out to the analyses of art historians, Yorùbá or not, one cannot necessarily assume a third party will understand the work just as its maker and user did. Additional corollaries to the question exist as well. What are the parameters of outsider status? Do they constitute a spectrum? Do insider advantages always trump outsiders’ perceptions? These issues become even more pertinent as distance from our own era increases. While the question of outsider/insider status does not constitute the thrust of Abiodun’s book, it is a major aspect of his introduction, and thus worth considering.1 While this paper considers the unique multiple contributions of Abiodun’s book, it also argues that careful considerations of objects and context can be made by outsiders, while insiders, like all researchers, can choose to ignore elements that conflict with their own preconceptions, develop greater interest in one topic than another, generalize their known experience to the whole of Yorubaland or apply it half a millennium into the past. While these perspectives differ, one does not automatically eclipse the other.

Hans Sedlmayr (1896–1984): Structural Approach and Pre-Modern Values

The prevailing part of art historians, critics and theoreticians from the mid-1950s even until today feels related to the means of expression of the modernist art trends from the last decade of 19th c. until the end of 1960-s. Modernism has become a sacred text, whose complexity should be interpreted, but not criticized. Sedlmayr’s conception of art is built on moral, religious, aesthetic and political grounds, which are the very reason for the actuality of his works – both in the specialized sphere of art history and in the wider public debate on values. That is why I will analyse his structural approach mainly in relation to his anti-modern conception of art. This is the task of this study. Sedlmayr’s effort to turn art history into a “strict science” is an independent part of his scientific pursuit; it is in relation, but is not subordinate to his conception of modern art. Those publications of his are discussed but only in the specialized literature on history of the methods in humanities, while his conception against modern art acquires an exceptional popularity. Because of that reason his theoretic contribution to the study of art remains in a penumbra. I argue that Sedlmayr’s conception has the following coinciding points with the official understanding of art in the time of socialism: – A denial to estimate art with aesthetic criteria, which the ideologists of socialist realism define as formalism, and Sedlmayr as aesthetism; – In socialism art should represent a positive ideal; Sedlmayr calls this ideal “human measure”; – Art should habituate to morals; – A conviction that the modern art from the end of 19th c. on is decadent; – A criticism against the “dehumanization” of art.

Iconography and Archaeology

This chapter critically examines how scholars have interpreted Roman portraits of the third century ce. It focuses on two case studies. The first is a famous portrait of Maximinus Thrax from the Albani collection and now in the Capitoline Museum. Read through the lens of late antique literary sources, the portrait has been seen by art historians as portraying Maximinus’ ferocity, physical strength, and low class, barbarian origins. The second case study is a far less well-known pair of portraits excavated at the Roman villa of Lullingstone, south of London, which became the object of a highly unusual domestic cult in late antiquity. These case studies are used to argue that the heavy reliance on iconography and literary sources required to interpret portraits lacking archaeological context is less reliable and less informative than interpretations derived from a combination of iconography and archaeology.