Volume 79, Issue 2

In the vast majority of representations of the Flight into Egypt, the child is huddled upon the Virgin’s lap or held in her arms. In addition to this traditional model, some interpretations of the Flight into Egypt show the child riding on Joseph’s shoulders or being held in his arms. The inventory of the representation of Joseph christophore from the fifth century to the mid-fifteenth century in Latin and Greek Christendom provides an insight into the frequency of this iconographic specificity of the Flight into Egypt, its diffusion and regional adaptations, as well as its meanings, via theological and exegetical texts.

When, around the turn of the fifteenth century, the art of northern Europe developed a pictorial motif whereby an angel delivers the news of the Incarnation in the form of a sealed document, the material properties of ink and wax metaphorically evoked the unique properties of the inscription of divine form upon Mary’s virginal body. The social impact of this communication, the dissemination of the message to a community of recipients, could be strengthened by references to the re-transmittable nature of the announcement, as enforced by other indicators of sociability detectable in different portions of the narrative scheme. The Tucher Altarpiece in Nuremberg and Michael Wolgemut’s altarpiece for the cathedral of St. Mary in Zwickau present two examples of uses of the epistolary Annunciation that may have influenced Albrecht Dürer, who employs the motif in his woodcut series The Life of the Virgin , which also contains, along with this pictorial form of broad address, more narrowly articulated messages to his contemporaries in the form of written words.

Virgil Solis (1514 – 1562), a prosperous artist and printmaker from Nuremberg, dedicated his final major work to an illustration of Ovid’s Metamorphoses . Although the designs of most of the woodcuts for this first extensive German series were borrowed from the Metamorphoses series of the French artist Bernard Salomon (c. 1508 – 1561), a closer study reveals several notable differences in the details of individual scenes, among them The Creation of the World . Placing Solis’ work within the tradition of the printed illustrated editions of Ovid’s magnum opus, which had by then crystallized mainly in Italy and France, the article argues that Solis’ illustration drew not only on the earlier Metamorphoses , but also on printed German Bibles, following the parallels taken up at the time between the Creation story in the Metamorphoses and the Creation story in Genesis .

If the nineteenth century is correctly seen as an age when a new and acute historical awareness reshaped the cultural sensibility, then it is no small irony that in the age of history, history painting was in crisis. One reaction to this crisis is the subject of this paper. Focusing on one of the Nazarenes’ most enchanting fresco projects, the decoration of the Casino Massimo in Rome after major epics by Dante, Tasso, and Ariosto, it traces the reworking and redefinition of history in painting by the German Nazarenes. In so doing, it examines the transformation of history painting into symbolic representation, and maps out the narrative structures, aesthetic strategies, and amalgamation of temporalities that carried this process and were produced in the process.

The paper examines the reception of HIV/AIDS-related artworks from the 1980s by comparing four New York exhibitions from the early 1990s and 2010s. It argues that to this day artworks dealing with AIDS are bound to political and moral demands of former activists from the AIDS movement in New York. This politicization of historical images of AIDS is striking since the disease has lost its fatal threat in Western countries and political constellations have changed. Yet current exhibitions focus only on activist, politically motivated responses to the epidemic in order to represent an “appropriate” remembrance of AIDS. Thirty years after the climax of the epidemic, images of AIDS are currently integrated in the canon of art history, while they are continuously claiming their political efficacy.

The stained glass in the axial chapel of Soissons Cathedral was moved there from the nave in the late eighteenth century. It was made circa 1250 by the “principal atelier” of the Sainte-Chapelle in Paris, and consists of fragments that survived the Huguenot attacks of 1567. This study establishes that these figural fragments glazed the nave aisles, while coeval grisailles – which survive only minimally – glazed the nave clerestories. The grisailles, known chiefly from nineteenth-century drawings, thus provide evidence for the nave glazing in the Lower Chapel of the Sainte-Chapelle, which was lost in 1690.