Jean Delville’s ‘L’ Allégorie de l’ Enfer’ (c. 1890)—or, Azrael and the Death of Solomon

Jean Delville was one of the most talented artists of his generation, producing a prolific body of paintings, drawings, poetry, and essays. This essay explores the relationship between a previously unknown drawing by the artist, recently come to light, and a long narrative-poem published in one of his earliest anthologies: Les Horizons Hanté (1892), titled ‘Azrael’. These early works reveal themes that were to become a mainstay of the artist’s oeuvre concerning the mystery of death, transcendence, and the path of the Initiate.

Giovanni Bellini’s Madonna of the Meadow, ‘Meditational Poesia’, and the Imitatio Christi

This essay examines Giovanni Bellini’s Madonna of the Meadow as a ‘meditational poesia’, focusing upon formal aspects that differentiate between embracing landscape and figural group and upon Bellini’s approach to this landscape and its contrasting staffage that elicits contemplative reflection. I examine three treatises that may have stimulated the artist and contend that Thomas à Kempis’s Imitation of Christ (translated as Imitatione de Cristo, Venice, 1488) provides thematic structures that most closely align with those characterizing Bellini’s painting and intimate its role in articulating a meditational approach by which a viewer can effectively appraise the Madonna of the Meadow.

The Frescoes in the Crypt of Saint Adam

This essay explores bibliographic and historiographical studies on the frescoed vaults in the crypt of Saint Adam, located in the church of Santa Maria Maggiore in Guglionesi (Campobasso province, Molise, Italy). The frescoes have never been the subject of a detailed study; in fact, they have received only sporadic mention in some volumes of Molise art and history. The most ancient bibliographic information that can be recovered is reported in the nineteenth-century La Cronistoria di Guglionesi by Canon Angelo Maria Rocchia (Guglionesi, 1830–1907) and the three glorious translations by the medieval Benedictine monk Saint Adamo Abate (990–1070). The canon mentioned the historical events that led to the establishment of the crypt and the changes in its pictorial decoration. This essay begins with Canon Rocchia’s hypotheses and moves on to further investigate the crypt and the history of the frescoes, bringing to light similarities and differences in the interpretation of the pictorial decorations.

The Heraldic Shield and the Woman’s Body in the Blasons Anatomiques du corps féminin (1543)

In the French Renaissance, the term ‘anatomical blason’ (blason anatomique) designated a highly descriptive love poem praising a single part of a woman’s body, while in heraldry, the noun ‘blason’ defined the ensemble of ornamental components constituting the shield. Just as the French verb blasonner meant to describe and to interpret the shield’s material and symbolic parts, so could this verb be used in amatory poetry to signify the act of lauding the details of the beloved’s anatomical parts. This study examines the structural analogies between heraldic shield and the anatomical blason, addressing how the technical terms defining the shield’s components such as partitions, points, charges, tinctures, and the achievement could be given analogous expressions in the anatomical love poetry.

Boundary Stones and the Rebellion of Nature

Boundaries demarcate property throughout European history, though the utopian dream of terrain without boundaries recurs, not least in association with the figure of the free-roaming god Pan. Ancient Rome had a god of boundaries, Terminus, associated by Horace with venerable, quasi-natural landscapes of human occupation. In Renaissance culture, Terminus is represented as a hybrid figure—part human; part lithic; often incorporated into architecture. This essay identifies a composite object in a Roman sculpture collection, noted for figures of Pan, as a model for Erasmus’s widely divulged emblem of Terminus, featured in images by major artists. Initially identifying himself with Terminus’s resistance to divine authority, Erasmus met with criticism for arrogance. In response, he drew on Horace’s ethically colored evocation of Terminus, now in connection with the ultimate boundary, that between life and death, as appears in Hans Holbein’s moving design for a monument to the humanist.

The Bessarion Chapel

The Bessarion chapel in the church of Santi Apostoli represents a new chapter in the study of the Roman Quattrocento. Its frescoes, painted by Antoniazzo Romano between 1464 and 1467, are a fundamental example of the Roman artistic taste in the early Renaissance. This essay examines unexplored aspects surrounding the origin of the chapel by understanding how Romano obtained this commission and how much he used visual solutions borrowed from the past. In addition, this investigation sets out to reconsider the artistic influence of the Bessarion commission, focusing on the paintings which have recently been discovered in the Orsini church of Saint Michael the Archangel in Formello (Italy). The questions concerning the Bessarion chapel raised in this study will lead to a more exhaustive understanding of this commission and will shed light on the complexity of the early Renaissance in Rome, where tradition and innovation masterfully coexist.

History of Painters in Le Mousquetaire (1855)

In Florence, where he stayed between 1840 and 1843, Alexandre Dumas received a very prestigious editorial commission, La Galerie de Florence, to illustrate the collection of the Grand Duke’s Gallery. Dumas produced a history of the Medici family, a history of painting from the Egyptians to the present, and Histoire des peintres. Several decades later he reprised some of these texts in Trois maîtres (1861) and Italiens et Flamands (1862), which profiled different painters. To understand Dumas’s selection of artists, we must consider an intermediate work of his that has so far been forgotten: his Histoire des peintres published in feuilleton format in the pages of Le Mousquetaire, a journal he founded and edited between 1853 and 1857. This study briefly sets out the history of this work, focuses on some elements of its commentary, and identifies it as an interesting case of pseudo-scientific popularization spread via new channels of mass communication.