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Editor’s Note: The Spice of Life

2021; University of Chicago Press; Volume: 40; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1086/714710

2328-207X

John Cunnally,

Previous articleNext article FreeEditor’s Note: The Spice of LifeJohn CunnallyJohn Cunnally Search for more articles by this author Full TextPDF Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreFor those who have come to expect a refreshing mixture from Source in terms of subject, medium, and period, this quarter’s issue will not disappoint. Gothic architecture, Venetian guilds, Michelangelo, eighteenth-century tapestry, cinema in the service of art criticism, South American painting in the nineteenth century, and the leisure reading of a French impressionist make up the bill. We do not claim to rival Cleopatra in sex appeal, but we too may say that age cannot wither nor custom stale our infinite variety!Marek Walczak calls attention to the motif of ropes which appear among the carved stone decorations of Gothic buildings in Poland from the fifteenth century. For example, a heavy cable of rope serves as a doorframe for the law students’ residence at Jagiellonian University in Krakow. The buildings in question were founded by the historian and diplomat Jan Długosz (1410–80), and Walczak suggests that this Polish humanist conceived of the rope motif as an allusion to Vitruvius’s account of the primitive origin of architecture; namely, twigs and branches tied together.It is a commonplace that the artists of Renaissance Florence were permitted to practice and maintain workshops in more than one medium—Verrocchio, Pollaiuolo, and Michelangelo achieved mastery in both sculpture and painting—but in the other Italian towns, including Venice, a conservative mind-set enforced an unwritten rule discouraging artists from crossing the boundaries that separated the several crafts. Lorenzo G. Buonanno reveals that this unwritten rule was in fact written down, at least in the case of the Guild of the Tagiapiera (stone carvers) in Venice, whose statutes forbade its members from joining any other guild. As Buonanno points out, this enforced separation may help explain why Venetian painters never developed the sculptural or plastic qualities of style which art historians consider the most distinctive trait of the Florentine school of painting.Michelangelo’s Moses was carved in the 1510s as part of the projected tomb of Pope Julius II, but because of the pope’s death in 1513 and the incessant demands on the artist’s time by other patrons, it was not set up and displayed in public until 1545. Consequently, as Emily A. Fenichel points out, the Moses was interpreted—or rather, misinterpreted—in light of the controversy aroused by Michelangelo’s Last Judgment fresco, finished in 1541. The Last Judgment was denounced by some as a neopagan celebration of nude flesh and defended by others as a depiction of the superhuman celestial bodies that we will enjoy after the resurrection. With this controversy in mind, Michelangelo’s friend and biographer Vasari praised the Moses as a glorious image of the patriarch’s post-resurrection celestial body, a notion that was surely not the sculptor’s intent when he designed it thirty years before the Last Judgment.A set of tapestries woven in Brussels in the 1770s, showing scenes from the life of Cyrus, is the subject of Koenraad Brosens’s essay. These were commissioned by Maria Theresa, Archduchess of Austria and empress of the Holy Roman Empire, and Brosens points out how this project was the fruit of a policy by the Habsburgs to stimulate and subsidize the arts in their Flemish province, suffering an economic decline during the eighteenth century. The theme of the Persian Emperor Cyrus, portrayed as an ideal monarch by the Greek historian Xenophon and praised in the Bible for treating his Jewish subjects with moderation, justice, and piety, was certainly chosen to remind the Flemish of the enlightened and beneficent rule of their empress in Vienna.Virtually unknown except to specialists in Latin American art history, Manuel Carvajal (1819–72) was a Colombian painter whose works included trompe l’oeil tableaux that appear to be random piles of visiting cards, photographs, miniature portraits, billets-doux, and postcards, not unlike the illusionistic paintings of bulletin boards with pinned-up stationery and flyers made in the nineteenth century by John F. Peto and W. M. Harnett. In her analysis of three of Carvajal’s trompe l’oeil compositions, Verónica Uribe Hanabergh suggests a political motivation for the artist’s autographomania, his fixation on fragile paper keepsakes and handwritten notes. By reproducing these ephemeral relics of friends and coworkers, Carvajal asserted the integrity and endurance of the individual during a period of unceasing civil strife and revolutionary violence in Colombia. “In a society under constant change, the autograph means permanence.”“Pierre Bonnard’s Books” by Lucy Whelan is the first of a two-part series consisting of a catalogue and commentary on the French painter’s personal collection of books and periodicals. These were found in a cupboard at Bonnard’s house at Le Cannet after his death in 1947, but not inventoried or examined until recently. In part 1, presented in this issue, Whelan provides an alphabetical list of about ninety items, showing the artist’s miscellaneous taste in literature, including fiction (mostly inexpensive paperbacks) by Conrad, Poe, Conan Doyle, Anatole France, Gide, and Céline, as well as examples of the classics (Homer, Epictetus, Villon), and various art magazines and museum guides. For those of us who enjoy detective novels (or Lloyd Webber musicals), there is some pleasure in knowing that the painter’s favorite author (on the basis of the number of titles in the catalogue) was the mystery writer Gaston Leroux, best known for his 1910 thriller The Phantom of the Opera.Most art historians regard movies about artists as dubious enterprises aimed at sensationalizing or vulgarizing the serious business of art making, useful only occasionally to substitute for a live lecture when the instructor is ill or out of town. The scholar and critic Carlo Ragghianti (1910–87), however, was convinced that the cinema could expand and deepen our visual experience of works of art, thanks to this medium’s native optical syntax of close-ups, long shots, panning, and montage. Joséphine Vandekerckhove analyzes Ragghianti’s greatest critofilm, Michelangiolo (1964), demonstrating how the filmmaker applied the aesthetic theory of his mentor Benedetto Croce, using cinema to project a lyrical synthesis of form and content. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Source Volume 40, Number 3Spring 2021 Sponsored by the Bard Graduate Center, New York Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/714710 Views: 249 © 2021 by Bard Graduate Center. All rights reserved. Crossref reports no articles citing this article.