Volume 85, Issue 4

The paper analyzes the wooden frame of Paolo Veneziano’s monumental Crucifixion, the largest trecento composition in the Adriatic to survive, on the triumphal arch of the church of St. Dominic in Dubrovnik. By including the scrolls’ foliage, the Old Testament prophets, and censing angels, this frame transforms a stylistically inventive yet typologically conventional “croce dipinta” into one aligned with the iconography of the arbor vitae by way of an unprecedented shift of attention to its margins. The full power of the Crucifixion is vested both in the body of the crucified Christ and its frame. At the same time, its overarching theme of the genealogy of Christ and his Passion can be subject to different readings, i.e. “doctrinal,” “liturgical,” or, as the paper tentatively proposes, “Dominican.”

The ‘painterly act’, which becomes quasi-visible and relivable in the impasto brushstrokes of Tintoretto and his contemporaries, is reflected in a terminologically concise and theoretically ambitious way only about a hundred years after their works were created – i.e., in the Carta del navegar pitoresco of 1660. Its author, Marco Boschini, not only coined the term ‘atto pittoresco’ but also programmatically embedded it in his dialogical speech about art, in which the importance of rhetorical categories recedes in favor of aesthetic maxims. ‘Pleasure’ and ‘joy’ of the beauty of painting and the act of painting incorporated in it are enhanced by the perception of the beauty of the lagoon city, which offers the viewer multiple views ( viste ) of the water with light reflections against a blue sky, shapes their good taste ( buon gusto ) and even promises recreation ( recreazione ).

This article focuses on the ephemeral, multimedia façade for the French Academy commemorating the recovery of Louis XIV from illness. Known only through an engraved print, this installation seems tobe the first – and perhaps the only – tangible manifestation of the collective work carried out by French architects, sculptors, and painters resident in Rome during the second half of the seventeenth century. The aim is to demonstrate that, in addition to constituting a precious reservoir of visual references, whose correct understanding depends on an archaeological study of the ancient and modern repertoires, this apparatus imposes itself as an ambitious project of political mediation at a particular moment in the history of the Kingdom of France.

Richard Caton Woodville’s 1848 painting War News from Mexico , made during his studies at the Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf, is among the most iconic American images from before the Civil War (1861–1865). Traditionally, it has been seen as a sentimentalized and politically ambiguous representation of the American “middling sort.” What has gone completely unnoticed is that Woodville systematically adapted every single figure and the basic composition from an even better-known painting by another noted genre painter, the 1822 Chelsea Pensioners by David Wilkie. But whereas Wilke presented an idealized depiction of the British “common sort,” Woodville – perhaps because of his perspective from the Revolutions of 1848 in Germany – constructed a critical, declarative, and even edgy view of American democracy compromised by the inherent contradiction of slavery. Such a claim of a direct political message for War News goes against a preponderance of scholarship that positions the artist (and to a degree all antebellum genre painting) as non-committal.