Abstracts & Authors Biographies

Art History as Ekphrasis

Jas Elsner
This paper makes a case for the essentially rhetorical
nature of the art-historical enterprise: description is the
key act which both translates the objects object-hood
into words appropriable for art-historical argument
and betrays that object-hood by making the object
something other than it materially is, a word-picture.
The act of description is not innocent; it is both the
product of a series of genres for describing objects and
it tendentiously helps the object into an initial verbal
form amenable to the particular discussion the author
has in mind. Different kinds of art history might be
seen as different forms or styles of descriptive strategy,
and it is perhaps time the discipline as a whole were less
coy about one of its core procedures one that is at least
as important as looking itself.
Jas Elsner is Humfry Payne Senior Research Fellow in Classical
Archaeology at Corpus Christi College Oxford andVisiting Professor
of Art History at the University of Chicago. He has been working on
the problems of description and ekphrasis for years, although this is
probably the first time he has fully come out about what he thinks the
issues are.

Versions of Pygmalion in
the Illuminated Roman de
la Rose (Oxford, Bodelian
Library, Ms. Douce 195):
The Artist and the Work
of Art
Marian Bleeke
Ms. Douce 195, a late fifteenth-century copy of the
Roman de la Rose, contains an unusual sequence of nine
images for the poems Pygmalion digression, the work
of the illuminator Robert Testard. This paper focuses
on differences between the story of Pygmalion as it is
told in the text of the Rose and in Testards miniatures.
Building on scholarship on the Rose that sees the
Pygmalion digression along with the poems Narcissus
episode as the poets reflections on poetry itself, and
on representations of images and the use of frames
in miniatures throughout Ms. Douce 195, the paper
argues that the Pygmalion sequence likewise represents
Testards reflections on the changing status of the artist
and the work of art.
Marian Bleeke is Assistant Professor of Art History at Cleveland State
University. Her other publications include Sheelas, sex, and significance
in Romanesque sculpture: The Kilpeck Corbel Series, Studies in
Iconography, 26, 2005, and George Petrie, the ordnance survey, and
nineteenth-century constructions on the Irish past, in Medieval Art
and Architecture after the Middle Ages (Cambridge Scholars
Press, 2009).The present essay represents the beginning of a project on
representations of sculptures in medieval manuscript illuminations.

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Scopic Frames: Devices for

Seeing China in 1640
Jennifer Purtle
This essay argues that alternative, imported, monocular
modes of seeing and conceptualizing vision prompted
late-Ming picturing of indigenous Chinese, binocular
visual experience. This essay first probes seeing in
late-Ming China by exploring printed illustrations as
artefacts of visual experience. Then it posits that, in the
face of Western monocularity, the representation of
moving and/or projected images reified indigenous,
binocular Chinese ways of seeing. The essay concludes
by suggesting that the seventeenth-century circulation
of optical devices between China and Europe reshaped
established practices, strategies, and ideas about vision
in China and Europe.
Jennifer Purtle teaches the history of Chinese art at the University
of Toronto. Her recently published and forthcoming work includes:
PeripheralVision: Painted Images and Chinese Empires, 9091646
(University of Hawaii Press, 2010); Looking Modern: East Asian
Visual Culture from the Treaty Ports to World War II (co-edited with
Hans Thomsen) (University of Chicago Press, 2009); and essays in
volumes edited by Wu Hung, Eugene Wang, John Onians,Thomas da
Costa Kaufmann, and James Elkins.

A Death in the Family:

Posthumous Portraiture
in Eighteenth-Century
England
Kate Retford
This article explores a number of unusual portraits
produced in eighteenth-century England in which
the realms of the posthumous and the living were
mingled. In some cases, the dead were brought back
to life and restored to their rightful place in the family
unit. In others, such as Joseph Highmores portrait of
the Lee family (1736), Thomas Gainsboroughs The
Sloper Family (178788) or The Knatchbull Family by John
Singleton Copley (180003), they were included in
spiritualized form, hovering in a supernatural realm
above the relatives they had left behind on terra firma.
The article unpicks the particular circumstances that
prompted these extraordinary commissions, exploring
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the personal and emotional histories of the sitters and

artists. It also draws conclusions about the broader
social, cultural, religious and artistic contexts that made
these relatively rare, and frequently problematic images.
Kate Retford is Lecturer in History of Art at Birkbeck College,
University of London. Her book, The Art of Domestic Life:
Family Portraiture in Eighteenth-Century England,
was published byYale University Press in 2006. In addition, she has
written a number of articles on topics relating to eighteenth-century
portraiture, gender, and the country house art collection.

The Art of Swinging Left

in the 1930s: Modernism,
Realism, and the Politics
of the Left in the Murals of
Stuart Davis
Jody Patterson
This article addresses the relations between modern
art, public muralism, and leftist politics during the
1930s in the work of Stuart Davis. While this period in
American art is largely associated with the dominance
of figurative works and the promotion of what was
perceived as a tradition of native realism, the art scene
was considerably more factional and complex than
current art-historical scholarship suggests. In addressing
Daviss approach to muralism, this article examines the
frequent characterization of realism and modernism
as antipodes on the aesthetic spectrum and explores
the potential for understanding modernist forms as
realist. Furthermore, it seeks to offer an alternative to the
isolationist emphasis characterizing standard accounts
of American artistic production in the 1930s, by
establishing a dialogue with the theories and practices
pursued by other modernists on the left such as Fernand
Lger, who similarly understood his approach to
modernism as decidedly realist.
Jody Patterson completed her doctoral studies on the relations between
modernist muralism and leftist politics in NewYork during the New
Deal era at University College London in 2008. In 2009 she was a
Postdoctoral Fellow in American Art at the Smithsonian American
Art Museum in Washington, DC and, from 2009 to 2011, she is
a Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow at the Institut National de lHistoire
de lArt in Paris. She has published book and exhibition reviews
in the Oxford Art Journal, Art History, and The Art
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Book. Her work on modernism in the 1930s has also appeared

in the Burlington Magazine and in a catalogue essay for
the Philadelphia Museum of Art exhibition Arshile Gorky:A
Retrospective. She is currently co-editing an anthology of critical texts
on the New Deal cultural programmes with Warren Carter and Andrew
Hemingway.

Garcilaso de la Vega and the

New Peruvian Man:
Jos Sabogals frescoes at
the Hotel Cuzco
Michael J. Schreffler and
Jessica Welton
This article examines the political tenor of Peruvian
painter Jos Sabogals work at a late and relatively
unexplored point in his career. It focuses on a series of
previously unpublished frescoes he painted in 1945
at a state-run hotel in Cuzco, the Andean city that had
been the centre of the Inca Empire before the Spanish
conquest. The study considers the historically themed
frescoes in the context of the contentious political
environment in which Sabogal designed and produced
them and foregrounds their engagement with the
discourses on national identity that competed for
prominence in mid-century Peru.

On Ruth Vollmer and

Minimalisms Marginalia
Anna Lovatt
This article considers the work of sculptor Ruth
Vollmer (190382), who began her artistic career late
in life after emigrating from Germany to the United
States in 1935. During the 1960s,Vollmer was a key
figure in the New York art world, holding salons at
her home attended by Robert Smithson, Eva Hesse
and Sol LeWitt, amongst others. These younger artists
published writings on Vollmers work and owned key
pieces of her sculpture. But while their work is now
well known,Vollmers has been neglected in historical
accounts of the period. Supporters and critics of
Vollmer have attributed this marginalization to a certain
anachronism, something I explore further in relation
to her status as an exiled subject and in relation to the
accounts of art history.
Anna Lovatt is Lecturer in Art History at the University of
Nottingham. She is currently working on a book exploring the role of
drawing in NewYork based artistic practices of the late 1960s and
early 1970s. Her previous publications include:A Space of Encounter:
On the Paintings of Robert Holyhead, Robert Holyhead, London,
2009; and Dorothea Rockburne: Intersection, October, 122,
Fall 2007.

Michael Schreffler is based atVirginia Commonwealth University, and specializes

in the art of colonial and modern Latin America. His current research centres on
visual culture and the state in colonial and modern Peru.

Jessica Welton is a doctoral student in the Department of Art History

atVirginia Commonwealth University. Weltons research focuses on
the representation of native cultures in the twentieth-century art of
the Americas.

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Matthew Bowman lectures in Contextual Studies at Colchester Institute and
works for Arts on 5 at the University of Essex. His interests are focused on the
relationship between art criticism and art history, and notions of temporality, and
he is a co-founding editor of Rebus: Journal of Art History and Theory.
Richard Thomson holds the Watson Gordon Chair of Fine Art at the University
of Edinburgh. Founding director of theVisual Arts Research Institute Edinburgh,
he was Slade Professor at the University of Oxford in 2009. He is a specialist on
late-nineteenth-century French art.
Sarah Monks is a lecturer in Art History at the University of East Anglia,
specialising in British art of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. She recently
completed a book on the representation of the sea in British art.
Keith Moxey is Ann Whitney Olin Professor of Art History at Barnard College
and Columbia University in NewYork. He has published extensively on the
historiography and philosophy of art history, as well as on sixteenth-century
painting and prints in Northern Europe.
Kallirroe Linardou lectures on Byzantine Art in the Department of Theoretical
Studies on Art, at Athens School of Fine Arts. She has published on the
relationship between images and texts in byzantine illuminated manuscripts and
co-edited a book on Byzantine Studies.
Gerard Foekema studied physics in Amsterdam. His interest in the architectural
history of India has resulted in two large monographs on Indian temples.
In 2003, he obtained a PhD in Art History from Leiden University.
Aris Sarafianos teaches art history at Ioannina University in Greece. He has been
a research fellow at the University of Manchester, the Huntington Library, and
UCLAs Center for Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Studies. His work on
art, literature, and the life sciences has appeared in Representations, Art
Bulletin, and Journal of the History of Ideas.

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Medieval Armenian
Rulership in Context
Kallirroe Linardou
Between Islam and Byzantium: Aghtamar and the
Visual Construction of Medieval Armenian Rulership
by Lynn Jones, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007, ixvi + 144
pp., 46 b. & w. illus., 55.00

The focus of Between Islam and Byzantium is Armenian

rulership during the years 884/851045 when
Armenia was in fact a vassal state of the Abbasid
caliphate, while Byzantium, although maintaining no
official representative on Armenian soil, also considered
it to be a vassal state. The two most prominent Armenian
families of the period, the Bagratuni with lands in
the north and the Artsrunik in the south, achieved a
largely conceptual unity during this period based on a
common language and a common Christian confession.
The author proposes a reconstruction and recontextualization of the expression of rulership during
those years as manifested in investiture ceremonial,
artefacts, architectural sculpture and royal deeds.
The paucity of surviving material is problematic and
Lynn Jones attempts to address this by placing her visual
sources clearly within the chronological scope and the
socio-political situation of the period. The volume of
surviving written testimonies is fairly large and thus
helps to support her analysis.
The principal question which Jones seeks to
answer is: what were the expectations associated with
Armenian rulership? What defined good rulership, and
ultimately, how was good rulership visually manifested
and manipulated? The bulk of the book examines the
limited artistic evidence available. The remainder details
the answers found in contemporary texts where it is
explicitly and repeatedly expounded for members
of both the Bagratuni and Artsrunik families that
the prime concern of any ideal ruler should be the
establishment of prosperity in the land and the care of
the Armenian people.
Through an examination of narratives
documenting the evolution of Bagratuni ceremonial
and the influence it exerted on that used by the kings
of Vaspurakan (the Artsrunik ), the author reaches
the conclusion that the most important expressions
of Bagratuni royal status and a primary tool of their
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1 Church of the Holy Cross,Aghtamar Island, Lake Van,Turkey, tenth century. Photo Paul Magdalino.

propaganda was the dual ceremonial bestowal or

confirmation of their legitimate power. The textual
accounts of the investitures of the first two Bagratuni
kings of Armenia make it clear that there were two
separate and distinctive investiture ceremonies: a
secular one that granted the Bagratuni kings the official
recognition of the caliphate and which acknowledged
the source of Armenian royal power and ranked the
newly appointed ruler within the Abbasid sphere of
influence, and a subsequent religious ceremony that
validated the recipients pious worthiness to rule
as a Christian king. The latter was performed by the
Armenian catholicos, the chief ecclesiastic of the
country, and involved the symbolically pre-eminent act
of crowning. The Abbasid ceremony was secondary to
the pious symbolism conveyed through the investiture
performed by the catholicos.
Like ceremonial, images served to visually
legitimize and exemplify royal status and piety, yet
any appraisal of the visual expression of the Bagratuni
is hampered by the dearth of surviving artworks
and architecture. No representations of Bagratuni
rulers survive from the first half of the tenth century
to compare with surviving contemporary written
records. Jones therefore undertakes an exhaustive
examination of the few surviving royal portraits of
the second half of the tenth century. She reaches the
tenuous conclusion that these portraits emphasize and
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advocate the specifically Armenian nature of Bagratuni

kingship, by eschewing any foreign emblems of power,
and therefore accord well with the ideology of kingship
mediated through the investiture ceremonies of the
Bagratuni kings; primacy is given to the pious profile
of the ruler rather than the recognition of his temporal
power. Finally, based on minimal and patchy evidence,
Jones proposes the existence of a secondary Bagratuni
tradition of royal representation that appropriated
elements of Islamic iconography.
The author then turns to consider the visual
expression of kingship as employed by the Artsrunik
kings of Vaspurakan and more specifically by Gagik
Artsruni (908943). Her analysis, conceptually
reminiscent of the exemplary study of the
iconographical programme of Cappella Palatina in
Palermo published by Ernst Kitzinger 1949,1 centres
on the tenth-century palatine church of the Holy Cross
at Aghtamar, a small island on Lake Van. Over two
hundred well-preserved figures carved in low relief
on the exterior walls of the church as well as the
poorly surviving cycle of frescoes of the interior are
scrutinized in the context of the churchs palatine
function. Jones convincingly demonstrates that, when
studied in juxtaposition, these two cycles convey a
unified royal message through repeated associations
of the same elements. They were both carefully
designed, following the conventions of an established
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Caucasian visual repertoire with Islamic iconographical

appropriations that have only a distant connection to
Byzantine imperial representation, in order to proclaim
and to advocate Gagiks temporal power, his piety and
the orthodox nature of his rule. Unlike the Bagratuni,
Gagik turned to Islam and flexibly incorporated
elements of Abbasid court architecture, iconography
and ideology that suited his specific requirements.
In her final chapter, Jones analyses the textual
descriptions centred upon royal patronage and seeks to
link these records of good rulership with those conveyed
by royal portraits and ceremonial. Overall, Jones book
provides a comprehensive and thorough examination
of a relatively unknown medieval society and its culture
and is therefore most welcome and appreciated. Last but
not least, a final remark about the title of the book, which
appears somehow misleading; the influence of Islam
is definitely present but Byzantium, a neighbouring
Christian empire at the apogee of its power, is notable by
its absence and this needs to be explained.
Notes

Ernst Kitzinger, The mosaics of the Cappella Palatina in Palermo, Art

Bulletin, 31, 1949, 27992.

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Byzantium Voiced through

Words and Images
Kallirroe Linardou
Art and Text in Byzantine Culture edited by Liz
James, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2007, ixvi + 230 pp., 8 col. and 48 b. & w. illus., 47.00

Art and Text in Byzantine Culture brings together a collection

of specially commissioned essays written by an
international team of scholars that consider how the
Byzantines wrote about art, how images and written
words work together on Byzantine artefacts, and how
the text embedded on artworks contributes to their
meaning, perception and interpretation.
The book covers the principal media used by
the Byzantines (texts, architecture, monumental
painting, icons and illuminated manuscripts) and it
has been structured and presented comprehensively.
All contributors touch upon vital aspects involved
in the study of art, such as visuality, perception and
performance. Overall, it is an efficiently edited, thought
provoking volume that addresses interesting questions
and investigates alternative routes of approach to the
subject matter under investigation, namely Byzantine
art, its creators and its audience. It will be of benefit to
specialists and students alike not least for the up-to-date
select bibliography.
The volume opens with an introduction by the
editor that summarizes the history of research and
addresses the essential questions to be discussed by
the contributors. Precedence is given to Byzantine
texts about art, and Ruth Webb engages in a reexamination of ekphrasis, a literary sub-genre of
rhetoric, as demonstrating individualized, culturally
defined responses to images, in possibly the most
interesting essay of the volume. She acknowledges
the cultural specificity of such texts and reads them as
a testimony of the process of a viewing and aesthetic
experience that aims to create mental images. The effect
of ekphrasis is compared to that of seeing something
directly with ones own eyes. As her case study, Webb
employs an ekphrasis by a fourth-century churchman
and writer, Asterios of Amaseia. According to her
analysis, the result is not just an ekphrasis of a painting,
but also an ekphrasis of a viewing of a painting by a
model Christian intellectual who wishes to generate a
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particular emotional response in his audience and to

encourage it to accomplish and fulfil the image in its
own imagination, within a carefully outlined frame that
Asterios sketches subtly in words.
Jas Elsner turns to a perplexing text that defies easy
classification, since it is a deliberate mixing of genres:
De Aedificiis by the sixth-century historian Procopius.
This careful enumeration of buildings was used by
the famous historian in order to articulate highly
ideological arguments about space and its meaning
within an empire and ultimately to become a testimony
and celebration of the New Christian Era that the reign
of Justinian initiated. Monuments are transformed into
a literary metaphor that is introduced into Procopiuss
discourse as an encomium of the emperor and his
virtues whose activity they voice and perpetuate.
By definition, word and images go together hand
in hand in illuminated manuscripts and because of
this, according to Leslie Brubaker, they were capable
of communicating more powerfully and expressively
than any other medium in Byzantium. Words, however,
communicate differently than images, and both
languages employ different conventions from a
given reservoir sanctioned by tradition and agreed to
by cultural consensus. Just like literary topoi within a
text, visual clichs build up the discourse of images,
create their structure and define their perimeters.
Consequently, it is legitimate to talk about visual genres,
namely visual formulae appropriate to a particular
visual narrative. The strength of the visual genre
controls subject matter and how it is presented in
illuminated manuscripts.
Charles Barber discusses an eleventh-century
illuminated psalter and its scribe Theodore in order to
shed light upon the complicated process that transforms
the written text into a perpetual performative act, which
conditions our understanding of both the texts origins
and its modes of reception. Robert Nelson carries the
discussion into devotional spaces and inscribed holy
images within them. Abbreviated inscriptions and nomina
sacra are considered as powerful signs that motivate the
holiness of the icon bearing them and act as mediators
between the image and its beholder. Unlike ancient
commemorative statues, Byzantine icons are not
speaking objects themselves and they do not perform
as such. Instead, the inscribed words are animated and
uttered by the beholder.The result is the creation of a
distinctive three-dimensional space for the icon that
is formed by the plane of the panel and the place from
which and in which it is contemplated and voiced.
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Bissera Pentcheva engages in twelfth-century

visuality as manifested in the appearance and display of
luxury icons. Risking a rather impressionistic approach,
she attempts to outline Byzantine interactions with
images as evidenced in the epigrams accompanying
them. She puts forward the hypothesis that the aesthetic
of plenitude and excess so prominently surfacing
in several epigrams, and inviting multi-sensory
encounters of the spectator with the icon, serves and
ultimately fulfils the desire of the donor or the beholder
to experience what is beyond perception.
In so far as inscribed names and texts are powerful
signs and integral parts of the meaning, function and
interpretation of an image, Henry Maguire argues
convincingly that their absence requires explanation.
The most obvious reason for the omission of names
in pre-iconoclastic art was to expand the referential
spectrum of the image as well as its effectiveness
by invoking more than one supernatural power.
Alternatively, in the case of ex-voto images, since the
contract was exclusively between the supplicant and the
holy person displayed, it was not essential to provide
identifying information to third parties.The study of the
sixth-century apse mosaics in the basilica of Eufrasius
at Porec proves this to be the case: the decoration of
the apse had a dual function, private and public at the
same time, and therefore identifying inscriptions were
provided only in the cases where a public audience
was involved.The anonymous saints were the object of
private petitions and thus remained unidentified to the
inconvenience of the modern art historian.
The last two essays of the volume are dedicated
to monumental inscriptions. Amy Papalexandrou
transfers the analytical focus from the archaeological
problems surrounding such inscriptions to the
arena of human experience in order to investigate
what actually took place within and around such
monuments and their inscriptions. Her primary aim is
to explore the hypothesis that Byzantine monumental
inscriptions as voiced texts could elicit active responses
from those who engaged in a kind of dialogue with
them. The reception, performance and context of
monumental inscriptions are approached through the
medium of contemporary experience and it is this that
makes her analysis fascinating.
Liz James legitimately questions the legibility of
monumental inscriptions and brings into focus the
visual properties of the inscribed word. She argues that
the visibility alone of written words as pure signs was
significant in itself, for their iconic power or for their
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magical or decorative qualities. Seen as such, namely

as images to be gazed at, inscribed words became
accessible to a wider audience, not necessarily literate.
Finally, a remark on the Appendix of Greek
Texts meant to complement the essays of Pentcheva
and Papalexandrou. In a volume intended to bring
forward the interaction of words and images as two
equally significant components for the understanding
of Byzantine art, an appendix containing the Greek
texts is certainly welcome. Nevertheless, the visuality
of the written Greek does not perform as it should;
numerous spelling and accentuation mistakes as well as
the wrong typeface in the application of breathings in
almost all epigrams confuse the literate reader/viewer.

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