Explores the visual idioms that made, sustained, revised, and resisted Cartesian philosophy. Locates Descartes's physics and its reception in a panoramic visual culture, where knowledge of the invisible depended on what could be seen.
Sculptural Encounter in the Age of Aesthetic Theory
Explores tensions in aesthetics and art theory between antique figural sculpture experienced in the round and its translation into two-dimensional representations. Examines the work and thought of Goethe, Winckelmann, Hegel, Walter Pater, Vernon Lee, and others.
As Dutch merchants became drivers of the transatlantic slavery business in the seventeenth century, Dutch art increasingly used Blackness to signal slavery and servitude. In this brilliant and pathbreaking work, Angela Vanhaelen proposes new ways of looking at Dutch paintings that do not equate Blackness with enslavement. Vanhaelen reframes the ......
In 1679, the commentator Joachim von Sandrart described Maria Sibylla Merian (1647-1717) as a painter who had perfected the art of the miniature and of flower painting, a high and deserved honour. Posthumously, however, it is Merian's status as an entomologist or naturalist that has garnered the most attention; she has not received her due as an ......
Nothing excited early modern anatomists more than touching a beating heart. In his 1543 treatise, Andreas Vesalius boasts that he was able to feel life itself through the membranes of a heart belonging to a man who had just been executed, a comment that appears near the woodcut of a person being dissected while still hanging from the gallows. In ......
In Slavery and the Invention of Dutch Art, Caroline Fowler examines the fundamental role of the transatlantic slave trade in the production and evolution of seventeenth-century Dutch art. Whereas the sixteenth-century image debates in Europe engaged with crises around the representation of divinity, Fowler argues that the rise of the transatlantic ......
In Slavery and the Invention of Dutch Art, Caroline Fowler examines the fundamental role of the transatlantic slave trade in the production and evolution of seventeenth-century Dutch art. Whereas the sixteenth-century image debates in Europe engaged with crises around the representation of divinity, Fowler argues that the rise of the transatlantic ......
Paper and Canvas in Seventeenth-Century Spanish Naples
The seventeenth-century Valencian artist Jusepe de Ribera spent most of his career in Spanish Viceregal Naples, where he was known as "Lo Spagnoletto," or "the Little Spaniard." Working under the patronage of Spanish viceroys, Ribera held a special position bridging two worlds. In Ribera's Repetitions, art historian Todd P. Olson sheds new light ......
Dress, Self-Fashioning, and History in Western Africa, 1700-1850
The Texture of Change examines historical change across a broad region of western Africa-from Saint Louis, Senegal, to Freetown, Sierra Leone-through the development of textile commerce, consumption, and dress. Indigo-dyed and printed cotton, wool, linen, and silk cloths constituted major trade items that linked African producers and consumers to ......
