Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts

For he shall give his angels charge over thee, to keep thee in all thy ways Psalm 91:11 Today the concept of the guardian angel tends to be thought of as an 'old' idea, but there is little indication that the belief achieved any widespread liturgical or artistic attention before around 1600. However, the largely forgotten cult of the Archangel Raphael, to which the concept of the guardian angel is closely linked, predates it by some length. This article considers how popular devotion to one specific angel developed into a more general belief in angelic intervention, through an examination of the iconography associated with the Archangel Raphael in sixteenth-century Venice. The understanding and representation of the role of guardian angels is examined, and I show how the imagery developed from the iconography of Raphael and his relationship with his attribute Tobias. In addition, I examine how the effect of Protestant criticism of the cult of saints -of angels in particular -and the efficacy of prayer affected the cult of Raphael and the saint's representation in Venice.

This article examines how portraiture is presented in Giorgio Vasari’s Lives (1550 and 1568). The Lives claims portraits are to remember the dead and instruct the living; to do this, they must be accurate copies of the sitter. Praising portraits as copies effectively endorses the often-promotional messages of the portraits themselves. However, the book praises some portraits as beautiful and miraculous works in neoplatonic terms. The idealism of neoplatonism is at odds with the requirement to have an accurate copy of the sitter and this apparent contradiction can be understood as a consequence of the unstated purpose of the Lives; to propagandise on behalf of Cosimo I de’ Medici’s Florence. The portraits of the Medici and their associates are praised as both lifelike and exceptional, and thus readers are encouraged to believe that the sitters are actually exceptional.

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Examines a new role for Personified-Death, and how, although Death came for all, there were different ways to die and the visual tradition is not even handed. Patrons have themselves represented experiencing the good death, while the bad death is used a warning to the general public to behave. It considers the use-value of ancient poetry in creating a less apocalyptic Death figure, and proposes a new interpretation of the standard saint and donor image.

The past decade has seen tremendous growth and innova- tion in the use of digital resources, methods, and tools in the history of art and architecture. While digital art history is less developed than text-based disciplines, the emergence of new digital standards for visual and spatial data, and ad- vances in computer vision are poised to revolutionize the field. This article provides a survey of recent developments in digital art history from the perspective of European and North American publications and conferences. I discuss the digitization of visual, spatial, and textual resources by muse- ums, research centers, and individual researchers. Research- ers have developed a variety of tools for digitally analyzing art and architecture, which can replicate or challenge tra- ditional methods of formal, iconographic, and socio-histor- ical analysis. Trends in published research indicate uneven growth in the theoretical sophistication of digital art history scholarship. While digital methods are quickly moving into the training of art history professionals and students, digi- tal art history communities in museums, research institutes, and universities remain somewhat fragmented. I conclude with a reflection on critiques of digital art history, several of which have not been fully addressed in recent scholarship.

Quantitative measurements of similarity can help researchers understand the increasing amount of manuscript metadata or digital images now available for study. Researchers in archaeology, ecology, and information retrieval have developed diverse methods for quantifying the similarity of categorical, numerical, and presence/absence data. The variety of methods in use reflects the complex associations of the term "similarity" and suggests that quantitative approaches can preserve some of the nuance associated with traditional humanistic approaches. We argue that similarity metrics, contextualized against random simulations, provide flexible tools for identifying and analyzing trends in large sets of multifaceted historical data and can be applied to many kinds of manuscript research projects. Simulations (permutation tests) that highlight how observed patterns diverge from random or theoretical scenarios have allowed us to interpret similarity measurements against a baseline that is analogous to researchers' intuitions born of experience. In this paper, we model using similarity metrics to conduct multifaceted analyses of an iconographic dataset derived from Lilian M. C. Randall's Images in the Margins of Gothic Manuscripts (1966), indexing images in French, English, and Flemish manuscripts produced between about 1250 and 1350. We share examples of approaches such as statistical analysis, Analysis of Similarity, and clustering to model the type of quantitative approaches we believe will become increasingly important for the analysis of digital manuscript data.

2 Strictly speaking, distance metrics must adhere to a set of axioms or requirements pertaining to spatial reasoning, while approaches to quantifying similarity that diverge from these axioms are usually referred to as "indices." In this article, we will use the term "metric" throughout, even when discussing approaches that violate the axioms of metrics. 3 The contributions of Lev Manovich on methods from data science are particularly relevant to our argument.

This article examines Big Bird (1965) by Frank Bowling in the context of its first-prize victory in the category of painting at the exhibition Tendances et Confrontations. This juried display of contemporary work by African-descended artists appeared at the 1966 Premier Festival Mondial des Arts Nègres, a celebration of Black creativity held in Dakar in the name of Senegalese President Leopold Sedar Senghor’s theory of negritude. I argue that the context of Tendances et Confrontations granted Big Bird a site-specific capacity to critique the social, racial and intellectual connotations accompanying representational and non-representational art, respectively.

This article’s contributions are twofold. First, it intervenes in prior literature examining works created during Bowling’s time in London, which have primarily been understood with reference to the artist’s biography. This essay argues, however, that by strategically deploying visual tropes associated with well-known American abstractionists, Big Bird and other works that Bowling created in the mid-1960s engage in critical appropriation and institutional critique.

This article also contributes to discussions linking negritude theory to the visual arts. Whereas prior literature has worked to identify the visual transposition of negritude theory through iconographical and stylistic analysis, this article suggests that a more substantive relationship between negritude theory and the arts can be accessed by examining artistic operations, such as strategic appropriation and recontextualization.