Volume 80, Issue 1

Andrea del Sarto’s Disputation on the Trinity (1517) engages with powerful traditions of spiritual learning that can be traced back to St. Augustine’s theological writings. This paper asks how and in what ways Andrea’s altarpiece might belong to such a rich intellectual history. The analysis connects Augustinian notions of desire and reform to the painting’s iconography and to the artist’s composition and treatment of color. This line of inquiry not only has exciting implications for the study of Renaissance altarpieces; it also lays the groundwork for a larger study of Andrea del Sarto and of his contributions to the period’s sense of spiritual reform, broadly conceived.

The palace of Duke Ludwig X in Landshut provides insight into the research concerning the development of Andrea Palladio. The palace is a link that illuminates the relationship between Palladio and Giulio Romano. For the “German wing,” the still unknown architect presented a remarkably innovative design. The duke had a second palace built behind the first after he had seen the Palazzo Te. The form of the “Italian wing,” with its refined combination of palace and villa, supports the authorship of Romano. That Palladio, for his famous project for Iseppo da Porto, took over the site in Landshut designed by Romano confirms the close relationship between the two architects. In I Quattro Libri , Palladio would later name the combination of the palace and the villa Casa degli antichi .

The article examines Daniel Mytens’s portrait of Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel, and the pendant portrait of his wife, Aletheia Howard (ca 1618), in relation to early modern rhetorical concepts in portrait painting and art theory. Particular focus is placed on the pictorial meaning of the depicted sculpture gallery in Lord Arundel’s portrait in its relation to the sitter. The author argues that the composition subtly transforms certain patterns of a long-standing pictorial code in portrait painting, which can be identified as a type of “picture within a picture.” Already established in the Italian portrait tradition, an integrated little picture or window view next to the sitter was a widespread formula in seventeenth-century Dutch and British portraiture, in order to praise a sitter’s moral and political virtues. Mytens reinterprets this portrait type, in this way inventing a pictorial mode of highlighting the particular virtues of the art lover: his portrait, through its adaptation of the picture-within-a-picture formula, praises the earl’s noble act of collecting antiquities while at the same time strongly emphasizing his intellectual strength.

In June 1790, the Assemblée nationale decided that the statues of slaves surrounding the monument to Louis XIV on the Place des Victoires were offensive to the inhabitants of some French provinces, and should be removed. This triggered a wide-ranging debate in the Parisian press, with calls for the conservation of the monument or for the use of the statues in a new setting. The discussion dealt with the monument’s iconography, but also with its aesthetic and historical significance, and reflected wider debates on slavery and on the (un)popularity of the monarchy. The article analyses these arguments, points out the importance of public monuments in Parisians’ relation to their city, and shows how the removal of these statues was part of a climate of construction, rather than destruction.

The Surrealist artist Richard Oelze’s postwar enterprise was one of inner reflection and personal questioning linked to the broader project of coming to terms with the past. The essay takes a critical view of his artworks and his automatist Wortskizzen to assess the manner and extent to which Oelze utilizes his artistic practice as a mode of working through his, and Germany’s, complicity with the Nazi regime. Analysis of the Wortskizzen exposes how verbal probing informs Oelze’s visual expression of inner turmoil, while implied gaps and voids in paintings and drawings puncture space as well as time, illuminating memory and blending the past with the present. Oelze’s serious play with word and image in turn invites his viewers to release repressed memories through reflective contemplation.