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Contributors include: Cristina Brito, Tobias Bulang, João Paulo S. Cabral, Florike Egmond, Dorothee Fischer, Holger Funk, Dirk Geirnaert, Philippe Glardon, Justin R. Hanisch, Bernardo Jerosch Herold, Rob Lenders, Alan Moss, Doreen Mueller, Johannes Müller, Martien J.P. van Oijen, Pietro Daniel Omodeo, Anne M. Overduin-de Vries, Theodore W. Pietsch, Cynthia Pyle, Marlise Rijks, Paul J. Smith, Ronny Spaans, Robbert Striekwold, Melinda Susanto, Didi van Trijp, Sabina Tsapaeva, and Ching-Ling Wang.
Contributors include: Cristina Brito, Tobias Bulang, João Paulo S. Cabral, Florike Egmond, Dorothee Fischer, Holger Funk, Dirk Geirnaert, Philippe Glardon, Justin R. Hanisch, Bernardo Jerosch Herold, Rob Lenders, Alan Moss, Doreen Mueller, Johannes Müller, Martien J.P. van Oijen, Pietro Daniel Omodeo, Anne M. Overduin-de Vries, Theodore W. Pietsch, Cynthia Pyle, Marlise Rijks, Paul J. Smith, Ronny Spaans, Robbert Striekwold, Melinda Susanto, Didi van Trijp, Sabina Tsapaeva, and Ching-Ling Wang.
Abstract
This study analyzed the morphology of the legs and feet of chairs from the Ming and Qing Dynasties using statistics, and the characteristics were presented in a data-based mode. With furniture samples collected from museums as the research object, the performances of chair legs and feet from different periods were analyzed using cross-analysis and chi-square tests in SPSS 22.0 to find out if statistically significant differences existed. The results show no statistical difference in the morphology of legs and feet of side chairs and armchairs with curved rest from different periods, while significant statistical differences exist in the morphology of the legs and feet of armchairs from the Ming and Qing Dynasties. The results can help people to have a deeper understanding of the legs and feet of chairs from the Ming and Qing Dynasties on a rational cognition level and provide new ideas for the inheritance and innovation of such furniture in modern times.
Abstract
The paper attempts to establish a dialogue between advertising, the Yugoslav avant-garde and a theoretical discourse on the “death” of the avant-garde. In a first step, the trope of the avant-garde dying through its techniques being appropriated by advertising is briefly scrutinized. In a second step, the article demonstrates that the axes of exchange between Yugoslav avant-garde movements (Zenitism, Hypnism, Dadaism) and early advertising were multifold and irreducible to a simple matrix of originality and bad appropriation. Finally, the results of the analysis are considered from the perspective of “peripheral modernism” and their consequences for the grand death-discourse are scrutinized.
Abstract
Focusing on the Spanish occupation of Tahiti (1772–1776), this text deals with the plan devised by Viceroy Manuel Amat to subdue the will of the islanders. My perspective takes the analysis into the realm of seduction, emphasising the key role of objects and bodies in the project. From a wide range of colonial sources, I address the specific forms taken by technologies of domination in particular contexts, the role played by the arrangement of bodies and objects in them, and the assumptions that made it possible to think of particular bodies as mouldable raw material in the Hispanic setting of the late 18th century.
This article explores themes of fertility and fecundity in Peter Paul Rubens’ work and investigates their role in a peculiar Rubensian category of subject, somewhere between landscape and myth, which can perhaps be described as ‘mythological genre’. Here we see the ancient gods of nature inhabiting the countryside and engaged in their ‘everyday’ activities, though, as in The feast of Venus (Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum), their presence is usually sensed rather than seen by any human characters depicted alongside them.
A particular focus of the article is one of Rubens’ most personal works, the Nymphs and satyrs gathering fruit (Madrid, Museo del Prado). It was his happy invention to give the nymphs, satyrs and even the old Silenus the job of collecting fruit together, to keep the cornucopia – symbol of abundance and fecundity – in a state of constant overflow. It has not been realised, however, that Rubens had a classical source for the idea of Silenus and the satyrs helping the nymphs gather apples: a passage in Propertius’ Elegies (II.32.37-40).
The poetry of Propertius was especially familiar to Rubens’ circle as Justus Lipsius planned an edition of the poet’s work. Moreover, the lines had been the subject of a notable emendation by Joseph Justus Scaliger, as well as an extensive discussion by Lipsius in his Antiquae lectiones (III). Rubens was surely familiar with the Propertius passage, whether he came across it in his reading or in his conversations on ancient literature and customs with his brother, Philip, Lipsius’ favourite pupil. In Nymphs and satyrs, the poet’s lines seem to have helped inspire a joyous celebration of the earth’s fruitfulness by the gods of nature themselves.
Abstract
In 1912 physician Leonard Mark published a book titled Acromegaly: A Personal Experience. Within, he documented his life suffering from the titular condition which manifested in symptoms ranging from headaches to the hypertrophic enlargement of the head, hands and feet. As the condition began to affect Mark’s ability to perform his medical and artistic work his writing had to contend with his changing identity, body, and the problem of how to effectively explain the experience of his suffering. At the same time as the wider medical profession was becoming fixated on acromegaly as a disease defined almost wholly by its spectacular visible symptoms, Mark’s writing invited his reader to go beyond the merely visible and engage with his narrative on a multisensory level. What emerges in Acromegaly, and what this paper explores, is how Mark used contemporary ideas of medical masculinity, particularly in deconstructing them, to invite this sensorial engagement.
The articles in this Oud Holland special issue ‘New perspectives on Rubens’ landscapes’ reassess Peter Paul Rubens’ late landscapes from a number of new perspectives. The occasion for this was the landmark exhibition Rubens: Reuniting the great landscapes held at the Wallace Collection, London from 3 June to 15 August 2021, preceded by a conference ‘Rubens’ great landscapes’ held at the Wallace Collection on 17-18 May 2021. The exhibition was in fact a reunion of A view of Het Steen in the early morning (c. 1636) from the National Gallery, London and The rainbow landscape (c. 1636) from the Wallace Collection – two great panoramic landscapes that were created as a pendant pair, but which had been separated for more than two hundred years.
This introductory essay explores the journeys and changing ownership of the two paintings from after their separation in 1803 to the time of their reunion in 2021. It investigates the growing fame of the companion pieces in Britain in the nineteenth century, where the greatest proportion of Rubens’ landscapes were already to be found. It focuses on the decisive moment in the history of the two paintings: the auction of the collection of the third Earl of Orford in 1856, when the chance was lost to reunite the pair at the National Gallery, and the negative press that consequently ensued against the winning bid (4th Marquess of Hertford) and the outbid (the leading national collection of old masters) alike.
The authors investigate the fate of Het Steen, from its acquisition by Lady Margaret Beaumont that effectively separated the pair, its role in Sir George Beaumont’s collection and its brief reunion with its companion piece at the British Institution of 1815. As part of the Beaumont Gift, it is one of the foremost paintings within the earliest collection of the National Gallery. The rainbow landscape, on the other hand, passed through a succession of private collections, where it became increasingly visible, engraved and discussed as one of Britain’s greatest masterpieces. The 1856 purchase was a possible turning point for Lord Hertford, the reclusive collector, who at this stage was considering what to do with his collection after his death.
This essay charts the trajectory of Rubens’ two great landscapes from the ownership of dealers, to private collectors, exhibitions, and finally to public museums, with increased visibility at each stage of their journey. Originally painted by Rubens for his own collection, to be displayed either on the walls of his manorial castle, Het Steen, itself or his Antwerp home, they would have been seen by a range of visitors, including artists and collectors. Two centuries later, they were to be found on the walls of Coleorton Hall and Wolterton Hall, two grand country houses in England. During periods of leisure spent at the invitation of the owners of these homes, later artists were able to contemplate these works and the surrounding landscapes and draw inspiration from them, and formulate their own artistic responses, in much the same spirit of ‘otium’ as outlined by Corina Kleinert in her essay. In keeping with the themes of this special issue, their history in Britain encompasses both the ‘prosaic’, transactional account of how they were sold, and the ‘poetic’ account of how artists travelled some distance to see the works in situ, to copy and be inspired by them. The pattern therefore complements the earlier provenance of these works, as part of a story of a gradual transferral from the private to the public domain.
This essay sheds light on Peter Paul Rubens’ intentions or possible underlying reasons for the ‘organic’ growth of his landscape paintings by analysing the fundamental contemporary notion of ‘otium’ (fruitful repose). Understood as contemplative leisure encouraging artistic and intellectual endeavour in accordance with Cicero’s advocacy of ‘otium cum dignitate’, it was deeply rooted in the classical writings of Horace, Virgil and Pliny the Younger. Ample research has shown that life in early modern Europe was tempered by the conceptual force of ‘otium’ and its opposite form, ‘negotium’. However, Rubens’ response to this dyad, and especially the effect it had on the creation of his landscapes, has only been addressed superficially.
By teasing out the strands of ‘otium’ and ‘otium ruris’ (fruitful repose in the countryside), the author indicates multiple ways in which the topos of retreat played a notable part in Rubens’ poetic response to nature and landscape, to the aesthetic appreciation of the countryside in real life and in painting. Exploring both places and spaces present in the notions of ‘otium’ and ‘otium ruris’ in Rubens’ day not only consolidates our understanding of the personal dimension of landscapes, but it also sheds new light on the artist’s attentiveness and receptiveness to and his ongoing preoccupation with many of his large compositions in the 1630s.
Although Rubens did not follow the idea of ‘otium’ programmatically, exploring it as a form of contemplative leisure nonetheless offers a key to understand the productive energy, artistic invention, and unique evolution of many of his landscapes. The examination of the important, but hitherto neglected landscape Return from the fields (c.1635-1638) at the Palazzo Pitti in Florence not only provides new insights to the painting’s intriguing genesis, it also demonstrates that Rubens’ landscapes may have provided a growing space of ‘otium ruris’ – for their creator and beholders alike.
Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640) is generally regarded as the painter of the Counter-Reformation and the embodiment of Flemish Baroque. Since the founding of the Belgian state in 1830, he and his art have been increasingly appropriated as a point of reference for the cultural identity of Flanders. Art was also appropriated in the formation of the national identity of the Kingdom of the Netherlands – in particular the depiction of nature and landscape that had become a speciality of many painters in the northern provinces.
But Rubens too was admired by his contemporaries for his landscapes, and in the Dutch Republic they were held in high esteem. For his part, Rubens can be shown to have followed closely developments in landscape painting on the Northern side of the border. Despite the difficult political situation, there was also an ongoing exchange between North and South, even during the Eighty Years’ War. Rubens bought and owned Dutch pictures, and added human and animal figures to landscapes of his Dutch colleagues. He took a general interest in such pictures as an incentive to paint landscapes himself, which, reproduced in prints, became well-known in the Dutch Republic.
In terms of landscape art, not only can a lively exchange of images and ideas be demonstrated, but it can also be shown that the existing differences were not understood as an expression of different political or religious contexts. The example of Rubens and his landscapes shows the value of a change of perspective to focus not on the differences between Flemish and Dutch art, but on cultural cross-border connections.