Volume 82, Issue 4

In a private room for Clemens VI (1342– 1352) in the palace of the popes at Avignon, frescoes show a peaceful vision of nature with flowering trees, numerous birds, and hunting scenes. There is a strong contrast between the castle-like architecture of the tower in which the room is located and the expansive view of plants and animals offered by the paintings. All of the people in the frescoes are more or less youthful, some collecting fruits, some bathing, and others trying to catch birds or rabbits. It is a very selective impression of nature, with much left out. The experience of nature articulated in the same period by Francesco Petrarca uses very similar elements. Apart from all differences, the frescoes and the writings of Petrarca share a newly emerged interest in nature in the middle of the fourteenth century.

Art historians have long been interested in the Portal del Mirador of the cathedral of Majorca. While the account books provide a wealth of information on the identities of the artists who worked on the Portal, several issues still need to be reexamined. This article conducts an in-depth reassessment of the artistic culture of Guillem Sagrera. Against the most widely held opinions, which relate Sagrera’s style to that of Claus Sluter and trends in Burgundy, the author stresses the need to relocate the Majorcan’s formative itinerary and place it in the context of artistic strands and exchanges whose nerve center was in Paris. However, the attribution of the Mirador Madonna to Sagrera is definitively ruled out in favor of the Florentine school and specifically Niccolò di Pietro Lamberti.

The essay presents a qualitative, quantitative, and online interactive analysis of the register of the Brussels guild of painters, goldbeaters, and stained-glass makers (1599 – 1706), in relation to the online database Cornelia . We develop a sketch of the legal framework; a discussion of the register’s methodological challenges; a bird’s-eye view of the source; a presentation of the method we used to transform the register into a dataset; and an analysis of the aggregate data. In doing so, we obtain a picture of the professional mobility of Brussels painters and their strategies. As one concrete result, the essay disproves the assertion that the Brussels guild pursued an overly rigid and exclusive membership policy; instead, it dealt pragmatically with the rules to ensure the continuity of the guild.

Using examples from the 1930s and the 1960s (the decades of show trials and the Khrushchev ‘thaw’), this article examines what ‘alternative jurisdictions’ – that is, courtroom-like debates outside the courtroom – existed in the Soviet Union, not only to debate, but also to make lasting determinations about what art is and who is empowered to judge it. Cultural and social restrictions – in the form of codes of conduct or an artistic “general line” (term after Sergei Eisenstein) – manifest themselves in these acts of judgement and condemnation. This raises the following questions, among others: What happens to the artist subject as a result of the various forms of ‘alternative jurisdictions’, and what is the task of the (artistic) collective? The investigation of typical Soviet quasi-judicial practices enables a deeper understanding of the mechanisms of contemporary Russian art trials, which attempt to silence artists who are critical of religion or society.