Volume 86, Issue 4

Since the 1950s, the papal collegiate church of Saint-Urbain at Troyes has been viewed as the product of two visually distinct building campaigns headed by different architects, the first exemplifying mid-thirteenth-century French Rayonnant architecture and the second embodying or presaging late medieval Flamboyant aesthetics. The present article challenges this narrative of linear progression by reexamining the architecture of the building’s little-studied west front and exploiting largely unpublished archival testimony. It attempts to demonstrate that matching specific sets of forms to (undocumented) individual architects is not as straightforward as hitherto thought, and that the choice of visual language was ultimately predicated as much on funding as on patronal intentions. In so doing, it updates the narrative of Saint-Urbain’s creation to comply with current scholarly conceptions about the material imprint of the artistic personalities of medieval architects.

The funerary monument of Bona Sforza, Duchess of Bari and Queen of Poland, in the Basilica of San Nicola in Bari has been a subject of discussion since the uncovering, in 1918, of documents which assign the marble authorship to a team of minor sculptors working in Naples around 1589–1593. Whilst research has focused on the history of this sepulchre, the name of the architect whom the queen’s daughter and heir, Anna Jagiellon, commissioned to design the tomb has remained unknown. Zygmunt Waźbiński, in 1979, proposed to attribute the project to Tomasz Treter, a canon from the Basilica of Santa Maria in Trastevere in Rome; this attribution, however, can no longer be upheld. This essay reviews the history of Bona’s monument and reassesses the question of its authorship. New evidence sheds light on the tomb’s models and reconnects its design to late-sixteenth-century tomb sculpture in Naples.

In the 1970s, American sculptor Charles Simonds created more than a hundred miniature settlements ( Dwellings ), reminiscent of the architectures of the ancient Puebloans of the American Southwest, in the dilapidated streets of SoHo and Manhattan’s Lower East Side. These Dwellings until now have been discussed exclusively in the context of Land Art and Process Art. This essay offers an alternative perspective by focusing on their character as ephemeral “sites of memory” and on the new concepts of time and history which lie at their roots. Based on the principle of pluri-temporality in history, they share remarkable similarities with concepts of time in critical anthropology and philosophy, namely Johannes Fabian’s critique of “the denial of coevalness” to ethnographic Others and the concept of “folded time” as put forth by Michel Serres.

Aimé Mpane is an especially versatile Congolese artist based in Brussels and Kinshasa. This paper examines his Nude (2006–2008), a life-sized sculpture of the idealized male form. Thinking carefully about Mpane’s treatment of the body, his selection of material, and his manipulation of the sculpture’s surface, I argue that Nude operates on an ethical level. The work engages with social conceptions of Black bodies, the history of nudity in western art, and—most interestingly—Frantz Fanon’s theory of embodiment, as presented in Black Skin, White Masks (1952). Nude thus allows us to explore the relationship between a leading artist of the African diaspora and one of the most important critics of the colonial condition. The work also contributes to our increasingly nuanced understanding of art’s place within the wider spheres of post-colonial discourse.

Oskar Bätschmann, bis 2009 Ordinarius an der Universität Bern und international bekannt durch seine Schriften zur Methodologie der Kunstwissenschaft, zu Phänomenen wie dem Ausstellungskünstler oder der Landschaftsmalerei sowie zu Künstlern und Theoretikern von Giovanni Bellini bis Heinrich Wölfflin, gibt anlässlich seines achtzigsten Geburtstags Einblicke in seine wissenschaftliche Laufbahn und Reflexionen über die Disziplin. Das Gespräch führten Kolleginnen und Kollegen, die an seinen Forschungsprojekten teilgehabt haben, namentlich Roger Fayet (Schweizerisches Institut für Kunstwissenschaft), Julia Gelshorn (Université de Fribourg), Sandra Gianfreda (Kunsthaus Zürich), Hubert Locher (Universität Marburg), Peter J. Schneemann (Universität Bern) und Tristan Weddigen (Bibliotheca Hertziana), im August 2023.