Volume 88, Issue 2

Drawing on a database of over 160 surviving monuments, this article explores the multi-faceted nature and genesis of Franconia’s rich, but under researched late medieval wayside shrine landscape. Part I begins with an overview of the extant corpus of Gothic wayside shrines, before proceeding with case studies that account for the extraordinary popularity of this type of roadside furniture during the two centuries before the Protestant Reformation. Part II sounds out the very beginnings of this sacred landscape during the fourteenth century, proposing three theses about the impact of climate change and its disastrous consequences; the rise of popular eucharistic devotion with its focus on the of the suffering body of Christ; and the formation of “peri-urban sacred zones” around towns in the decades bracketing the year 1300.

The brass and stone tomb of Louis of Mâle and Margaret of Brabant, Count and Countess of Flanders, and their daughter Margaret, Duchess of Burgundy, formerly in St. Peter’s Church, Lille, is long destroyed but had a pivotal role in the history of Burgundian funerary sculpture. It was commissioned in 1453 by Louis’s great-grandson Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy, although it was Duchess Isabella of Portugal who actually negotiated its contract with the Brussels brass founder Jacob van Gerines. Close examination of the circumstances of the tomb’s creation, notably Philip’s recent suppression of the Ghent revolt, illuminate the interrelation of materiality and identity underpinning the choice of brass for the monument, and the significance of brass for its audiences and its patrons.

The article focuses on the analysis of four previously unpublished Neo-Latin epigrams penned by Giovan Giacomo Calandra, a leading officer and humanist serving at the court of Mantua, in celebration of Lorenzo Costa’s portrait of Isabella d’Este (1508). Art historians have long been aware that Isabella had solicited Calandra to supply her with a few elegiac couplets as a way of exalting one of the very few portraits of her which she actually liked. Equally well known is the fact that one of the epigrams was likely included as an inscription in Costa’s (now unidentified or lost) painting, but the texts had not previously been located. The article then contextualizes these rediscovered poems, relating them to the literary and artistic culture that flourished around the marquise of Mantua.

This article focuses on the highly innovative, but neglected, Irish-English artist Thomas Frye (c. 1710–1762). It examines especially the visual potency of his late mezzotints in a depth not afforded these works before. The character heads of Giambattista Piazzetta were his self-acknowledged inspiration. In all of these mezzotints, Frye adopted, to varying degrees, a portrait-like format transformed by the concept of the “fancy picture.” The resulting works comprise a different form of portraiture altogether. This article also reveals Frye’s recognition of the potential of the mezzotint medium. In ways unlike those of any other artist working in the medium, he exploited the capacity of the “Black Art” for pictorial richness.

This essay is a contribution to research into the art market of the painter Max Slevogt. It identifies and locates works by Slevogt that were offered and sold at Hugo Helbing’s auction house in Munich between 1905 and 1935. The focus of the study is the 1927 Helbing auction of the collection of the Breslau entrepreneur Leo Lewin, from whose holdings 36 works by Slevogt were offered and sold. Numerous early provenances of works by Slevogt can be revealed on the basis of the auction house’s so-called protocol catalogues.