Volume 88, Issue 1

Between 1463 and 1467, Cardinal Bessarion (ca. 1403–1472) constructed one of the biggest funerary chapels in Quattrocento Italy. Based on newly discovered archival material, this article will examine how Bessarion’s self-fashioning for the afterlife in his chapel built on existing patterns of patronage in the basilica of Santi Apostoli while consciously standing in contrast to them. I will argue that competition for space and visibility within the basilica of Santi Apostoli were key factors informing Bessarion’s choices for his chapel during its construction. A deeper understanding of this process will provide new insights into the power structures behind the erection of one of the largest funerary chapels of the Quattrocento.

Although left-right reversal is intrinsic to many image-making technologies, art history has paid limited attention so far to the wide range of its operational and theoretical implications. Focusing on the layered production of meaning characterizing early modern prints, this essay examines the variety of attitudes that existed toward lateral reversal in Western printmaking and how they have been assessed by art history. By engaging with intersecting perspectives from disciplinary discourses, it ultimately advocates for the historical and theoretical significance of those images that exist in either of their possible lateral orientations: images that unfold themselves as they migrate across media as well as through the imagination of artists and viewers alike.

This article examines Osman Hamdi’s 1888 painting Turkish Street Scene (Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin) via correspondence acquired from Ottoman and German archives. It aims to contextualize both the painting’s purchase by the Berlin Nationalgalerie and its iconography within German policies toward the Middle East at the time. The author argues that, in correlation with the policies of Sultan Abdülhamid II, Osman Hamdi engaged in power relations with German authorities as the director of Istanbul’s Imperial Museum of Antiquities, creating conditions for the purchase of the painting and the cultivation of his artistic career in the German Empire. The case is made that the painting’s composition manifests a subjectivity in compliance with the prevalent Orientalist discourses reinforcing the hierarchic relations established with the German state.

This essay attempts to understand to what extent, and how, the term “Nouvelle Objectivité” (New Objectivity) is used in France to describe and understand the works of a number of German artists of the 1920s, to what extent it is considered to designate a movement, a trend, or even a category, and what artistic, cultural and political issues are at stake in its use. Although the works were not visible in France until the 1970s for collective exhibitions, the notions were used in France as early as the 1920s, although they were not firmly associated with specific artists. Invisibilised during the 1950s under the more general category of expressionism, “Nouvelle Objectivité” found a more specific use in France from the 1970s onwards. Even then, however, its use was fraught with questions about the range of artists falling under this term, its geographical extension, and its categorical specificity.

When Luca di Tommè’s Crucifixion in the Museo Civico, Montepulciano, first appeared in 1926, it became the only known Sienese painting on cloth from the Trecento, and thus a rare example of a type of Early Italian painting about which little is known. Because it was painted on cloth, it has been called a processional banner, yet until now no attempt has been made to determine whether in its choice of materials, or in its construction, it conforms with how banners were traditionally made, as described by Cennino Cennini in his Il Libro dell’Arte . That all changed during the Covid pandemic of 2021 and 2022, when the author examined letters, reports and photographs of the painting provided to him by Lucia Monaci, a Florence-based researcher, to reconstruct how the Crucifixion was made and had been altered since 1926. Although the painting is now mounted to a wood panel, based on the information provided by Monaci, and the author’s own research on the painting in 1975, he concludes that the painting was most probably conceived as a single devotional painting and not as a processional banner.