Volume 79, Issue 1

Among the early medieval illuminated manuscripts of the ninth century, the De laudibus sanctae crucis (Cod. Reg. Lat 124) by Hrabanus Maurus offers one of the most complex interplays of image-text relationships based on carmina figurata . It unfolds different levels and strategies of figuration. The specific aspects and qualities of its iconic practice can be described as a kind of coding. The coded subject and leitmotif of the cycle, which affects and gives structure to all other miniatures, is the central figure of Christus triumphans . The essay focuses on the detailed description and analysis of this symbiotic dynamic of a figural impulse that combines seeing, reading, and imagination into a meta-concept of figuration.

Caravaggio’s emblematic Medusa is mostly regarded as a representation of the mirrored decapitation of the Gorgon and thus as a reflection on Perseus’ protective shield. This essay proposes a new interpretation: Caravaggio’s Medusa is an adaptation of the antique Gorgoneion . The Gorgoneion historically depicted Medusa’s head with its petrifying gaze, which was placed on the shield of Athena. Due to its symbolic and protective power, the Gorgoneion became a frequent subject in art and handicraft well into Baroque art. Caravaggio’s contemporaries – including the poets Gaspare Murtola and Giambattista Marino – left witness that they interpreted the image as a Gorgoneion . In addition, the image itself contains elements that buttress this interpretation, including, inter alia, the green surface of the shield and the shadow. Both the historic accounts and the painted details therefore render an interpretation of the painting as Gorgoneion very likely.

The role of Giulio Mancini as the father of connoisseurship has been recently questioned on the grounds that Mancini never aimed to discuss the attributions of contemporary works of art. Generally the birth of modern connoisseurship , with figures such as the Richardson brothers, has been linked to the growing art market of the 18th century, and the most important 17th-century forerunners, such as Marco Boschini, acted as dealers as well: all these connoisseurs dealt with the attributions of paintings of the previous centuries. This paper explores the roots of connoisseurship in the topography work of Mancini, author of the first modern artistic guide to Rome. Mancini, studying the early Renaissance frescoes in Rome (Jacopo Ripanda, Pastura, Pinturicchio, Baldassarre Peruzzi), discussed Vasari’s biographies and suggested new attributions with a modern approach that clearly anticipates the method of later connoisseurs .

A Self-Portrait as Landscape Painter: Caspar David Friedrich and Phrenology The article explores a precocious moment of interest in how the brain mediates aesthetic perception. Around 1810, Caspar David Friedrich drew himself with several features that deviate from his earlier self-portraits, including two bumps between the brows at the root of the nose. These cranial protuberances were associated with a cognitive faculty that the phrenologist Franz Joseph Gall insisted is common among landscape painters: Ortssinn , characterized by a heightened ability to remember places and to measure distance and perspective. I argue that Friedrich’s drawing is a self-portrait as landscape painter , where the signifiers of identity are no longer conventional artistic or sartorial attributes but rather the contours of the cranium and, by implication, the fabric of the artist’s mind.

Deutsch-deutsche Kunstgeschichte am Beispiel von Hanne Darboven und Werner Tübke The histories of art in former East and West Germany have been described as evolving synchronously. This article, arguing from another point of view, analyzes two works from the 1980s, both of them outstanding in purpose and size: Werner Tübke’s monumental painting Frühbürgerliche Revolution in Deutschland in the Museum Bad Frankenhausen (formerly GDR) and Hanne Darboven’s Bismarckzeit in the Kunstmuseum Bonn (FRG). The investigation into their subjects, forms, and contents within their historical contexts – the period of Erich Honecker’s claim for a socialist tradition and Helmut Schmidt’s Realpolitik , respectively – reveals a greater distinctness grounded on different concepts of art, i.e., anti-modern (Tübke) versus modernist (Darboven). Nevertheless, in their view of German history a common kind of scepticism about teleology may be discerned, which is based on the artists’ shared experiences of Germany’s disastrous contribution to the twentieth century.

Ein Relief mit der Geißelung Christi im Kulturhistorischen Museum Stralsund und einige Bemerkungen zu einer niederländischen Werkgruppe aus der ersten Hälfte des 15. Jahrhunderts The collection of the Stralsund Kulturhistorisches Museum contains a hitherto almost undocumented carved relief of the Flagellation of Christ. Its style suggests that it belongs to a group of widely disseminated works of Flemish origin. For example, similar stylistic details can be observed in the retables of the Capela da Santo Antão da Faniqueira in Portugal, and the Aegidienkirche, now in the St. Annen-Museum, Lübeck. This article will argue that the carvings of the Heiligenthaler altarpiece in the church of St. Nikolai in Lüneburg, traditionally held to be locally produced work, should also be reattributed to this group of works. Consequently, the attribution of a further relief illustrating the Temptation of Christ in the collection of the Liebieghaus Museum (Frankfurt a. M.), also currently regarded as having originated in Lüneburg, should be reconsidered in light of this new classification.