The Art Bulletin articles from December 1997

The Art Bulletin archives from December 1997

Imagining the motherland: Puvis de Chavannes, modernism, and the fantasy of France. (Puvis de Chavannes' mural 'Summer')
December 1, 1997... If there is one word that, today, seems to express a noble and pure idea, it is the word patrie; governments know how to manipulate this word with singular cleverness, and men who sincerely detest tyrannies allow themselves, nevertheless, to be...

Skirting the issue: Manets's portrait of 'Baudelaire's Mistress, Reclining.' (Edouard Manet)
December 1, 1997... From the time of the posthumous inventory of paintings taken in Edouard Manet's Paris studio in 1883, the crinolined figure reclining on a sofa has been identified as the mistress of the poet Charles Baudelaire [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 1...

Gift exchange and art collecting: Padre Sebastiano Resta's drawing albums.
December 1, 1997... "The fame of great men ought always to be estimated by the means they use to acquire it." So wrote Francois, duc de la Rochefoucauld, in his Reflexions ou sentences et maximes morales (1663), reflecting an aristocratic preoccupation with the...

Gifts for Michelangelo and Vittoria Colonna.
December 1, 1997... In a study of that central document of Italian Evangelism before the Council of Trent, the Beneficio di Cristo, Carlo Ginzburg and Adriano Prosperi noted how far the culture presupposed by this bestseller of 1543 had come from the culture of...

On Alberti's "sign": vision and composition in quattrocento painting. (Leon Battista Alberti's commentary 'On Painting')
December 1, 1997... Historians of art have long regarded composition as a major achievement of Renaissance painting. In making this assessment, they are echoing the views of Leon Battista Alberti, whose commentary On Painting offers the first critical appreciation...

Saint Eudokia and the imperial household of Leo VI.
December 1, 1997... In 907, Constantine Lips, a high-ranking member of the Byzantine court, inaugurated a church dedicated to the Virgin in the presence of the emperor Leo VI. An inlaid marble plaque representing a female saint was part of the building's revetted...

Procopius and the imperial panels of S. Vitale.
December 1, 1997... The imperial panels in the church of S. Vitale at Ravenna are perhaps the most famous of all Byzantine mosaics. The two panels face each other, one on each side of the apse. The left panel [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 1 OMITTED] shows the Byzantine...

Benozzo Gozzoli.
December 1, 1997... New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996. 340 pp.; 325 ills., 121 in color, 204 b/w. $60.00 Diane Cole Ahl, a highly skilled, persistent, and reliable scholar, has written a monograph on the fifteenth-century master Benozzo Gozzoli (Benozzo di...

The Exceptional Woman: Elisabeth Vigee-Lebrun and the Cultural Politics of Art.
December 1, 1997... Vigee-Lebrun and the Cultural Politics of Art Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. 353 pp.; 45 b/w ills. $40.00 These three books share not only a common field of investigation - French visual culture and architecture of the 18th century...

The Art of Louis-Leopold Boilly: Modern Life in Napoleonic France.
December 1, 1997... New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995, in association with Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, and National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. 221 pp.; 50 color ills., 125 b/w. $55.00 These three books share not only a common field of investigation -...

The Rococo Interior: Decoration and Social Spaces in Early Eighteenth-Century Paris.
December 1, 1997... New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995. 342 pp.; 40 color ills., 256 b/w. $65.00 These three books share not only a common field of investigation - French visual culture and architecture of the 18th century (extending, in Siegfried's case, to...

High Art: Charles Baudelaire and the Origins of Modernist Painting.
December 1, 1997... University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996. 220 pp.; 21 b/w ills. $39.50 In his preface to High Art: Charles Baudelaire and the Origins of Modernist Painting, David Carrier recalls the experience of wandering the streets and...

Three Artists (Three Women): Modernism and the Art of Hesse, Krasner and O'Keefe.
December 1, 1997... Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996, 346 pp.; 30 color ills., 101 b/w. $35.00 The latest entry into what might be termed the "Significant Others" discourse is Anne Middleton Wagner's Three Artists (Three Women): Modernism and the...