This chapter focuses on how Pater looked at the natural world and art. It discusses how he practiced and thought about the very act of looking. For him, this was both an acutely personal act, and something demanding recognition that the object being looked at has its own specificity – material, historical, and contextual. This chapter asks what qualities he retained as visual touchstones across the broad historical timespan, from the Greeks to the present day, that he addressed; and through the variety of different modes in which he captured the objects of sight – essays, reviews, fiction, and imaginary ‘portraits’ of figures from the past. It shows that all are unified by Pater’s habits of looking, including how he saw colour, and by the process of translation into verbal language, with attention to works including ‘Emerald Uthwart’ and Marius the Epicurean.

This chapter focuses on Pater’s most famous work, Studies in the History of the Renaissance, to provide an expansive context in which to understand its significance in intellectual, literary and art history. It begins by locating it: explaining the concept behind Pater’s collection of eleven essays in terms of publication history and the periodical press, and exploring the ways in which these essays combine silent citation with originality. Its sections concentrate on: (1) how and why Pater redefines the ‘renaissance’ from the ways in which it was conceived in the nineteenth century; (2) Pater’s definition of subjective aesthetic criticism, which reverses Matthew Arnold’s critical position, with particular attention to the Preface and Conclusion; (3) the centrality of desire and passion in text; (4) Pater’s subject-positioning between the ‘Old Masters’, modernity and his reader.

This chapter tests those Indigenous directions and artistic visions of learning environments with close readings of local-level expressions of religious and cultural learning. Anchored in Huejotzingo and Calpan, but contextualized with valley-wide initiatives, the chapter exposees Indigenous contributions to learning environments in ethno-spatial analysis. Artwork and architecture developments from 1550s are exemplified as local interpretations of Christianity and local traditions beyond European prescriptions. The chapter argues for a multicultural reading of the lessons imparted in church courtyards, showing how place-based pedagogy and preexisting modes of learning could have informed convent-goers’ takeaways. Instead of wholly Christian convents were partial and un-wholistic pedagogical expressions, ripe for Burkhart’s slippages. Practice and place-based observances could cause a survivance of local history and Indigenous knowledge to persist, working effectively alongside the dogmatic reading of church art. Here, the overarching vision of learning emerges with critical visual and material culture studies of biblical figures, placements, enjambments, and reassessments of Indigenous sources that may have offered some friction in design choices of architects of the perfect classrooms of colonialism.

The book’s introductory chapter opens with a discourse on the power of images, arguing that long-standing practices of image use and veneration came under increased scrutiny during the religious reforms that followed the Council of Trent, broadly considered the Catholic response to the Protestant Reformation. It introduces the reader to the book’s argument, namely, that the pressures of Catholic reform increased the power of images, in contrast to stereotypes of late sixteenth-century art as stylistically regressive. It spends time elaborating on the book’s guide, the cardinal-archbishop Carlo Borromeo, arguing that this stodgy reformer is the best way to tell this story about the power of images after Trent.

This chapter examines the fictions of nautch dancers painted by local artists (patuas) in nineteenth-century Kalighat paintings from Bengal. Part I, ‘Bazaar Art, Bazaari Women’, highlights key features and techniques of Kalighat paintings in representing the female/courtesan figure (or Bibi). Part II, ‘Patuas and Performance’, discusses the intimacy between visual and performance worlds in Kalighat paintings, noticing how patuas borrowed gestures and bodies from Bengal’s performance forms such as jatra and khemta. Through contemporary social satires and reviews produced by caste-privileged, Bengali male authors, the chapter tracks a growing anti-nautch narrative targeting the baiji and khemta dancers of Bengal whilst popular circulation of their imagery through Kalighat paintings flourished. Part III, ‘Murdering Dance’, examines two real murders: the 1873 Tarakeshwar case, a sensational event that rocked Calcutta and was captured in several notable Kalighat paintings, and the 1875 Sonagachi murder case of Golap, a sex worker in Calcutta. Visual traces of these two murders are read as part of an anti-nautch discourse in which colonial law and native patriarchy centred violence against a dancer’s body within debates on female sexual desire and deviance, and against which subaltern women performed their insurgent gestures of refusal.

Chapter 3 observes the stark contrast between long-standing practices of market opacity and secrecy in the field of cultural property and current legal, professional, reputational, and ethical trends that promote a requirement to engage in due diligence in dealing with cultural property. It then highlights the changing role and scope of provenance research, which has evolved from a highly selective focus on an object’s “career highlights” to promote its value to the task of identifying potential “dark holes” in the chain of title and possession of an item since its creation or discovery. This changing paradigm can be largely attributed to the renewed interest, as of the 1990s, in the history of items that may have been involuntarily lost by their Jewish owners during the Nazi era. This chapter shows how the professionalization and systematization of provenance research, while taking different forms across various jurisdictions in Europe and beyond, may prove essential for promoting provenance research on the history of other cultural items, such as colonial-era objects.

Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper caught the new enthusiasm for Renaissance Italy among writers, artists, critics, and historians that was so prominent a feature of British culture in the second half of the nineteenth century. Particularly influential was Walter Pater’s Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873), which celebrates the multiple temporalities of the Renaissance, its reconciliation of pagan and Christian, and its capacious embrace of the ancient past and a dynamically conceived modernity. Michael Field’s collection of ekphrastic lyrics Sight and Song (1892) is dominated by the Renaissance art that inspired the art and writing of many in the poets’ circle, including Pater himself, Ruskin, Browning, Rossetti, Swinburne, the Berensons, Vernon Lee, Ricketts, Shannon, Beardsley, and Wilde. This chapter argues that it was these artists and writers, all drawn to fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Italy, who collectively established the most significant context for Michael Field’s creative engagement with the Renaissance.

Abstract: Anne attended Vassar College as an undergrad. In college, Anne played basketball, field hockey and lacrosse. After winter break, she no longer felt like herself, stayed in her room listening to the Rubber Soul album on repeat, and had violent thoughts. One morning, overcome by a panic, Anne ran outside screaming. Her friends raced after her and forced her to go to the little health center on campus. After a while, a psychiatrist asked Anne about the problem. She said nothing, but after a few days, it was clear she would not be let out until she talked. She told the psychiatrist she wanted to kill people. He asked Anne what she wanted to do in life, and she told him she wanted to be a doctor. He said it was a bad idea; she should take some time off from school. Eventually, her depression, which lasted for months, stopped on its own, but it was not the last time she would be depressed. Anne spent summers in Chicago working at local hospitals. Anne got good grades. She was a chemistry major and philosophy and art history minor. Anne’s pediatrician suggested she apply to institutions offering a combined MD/PhD program so she could work in the lab and/or with patients. She graduated summa cum laude in chemistry and thirteenth in the 1969 class of 400.

Chapter 14 presents a dynamic model of long-term, art historical trends and shows the complexity of overlapping styles and movements. It is based on a modification af a dynamic model of development on the timescale of the human life course. The basic evolution rules are those of simultaneously operating processes of consolidation of the status quo and processes of innovation driven by a familiarity-novelty optimum. The simulation explores different scenarios, one of which generates the typical art-historical pattern of overlapping continuous as well as discontinuous processes.

Chapter 10 focuses on the time scale of art history, which spans centuries or even millennia. It begins by showing how art historical processes can be interpreted in terms of complex dynamic systems. It then discusses patterns of art historical change, from linear to stepwise to metastable change. The chapter addresses the question of continuity and discontinuity in art history from both quantitative and qualitative perspectives. Finally, it discusses how the concepts and methods of network theory can help us to understand the complex dynamics of artworlds.

Political monuments are characterized by visual materiality that allows for and indeed invites engagement; the claim for permanence; and the force of visual presence. Caesar’s monuments, especially on the Capitol, signalled a decidedly new quality of presence irreconcilable with the fine balance of individual achievement and public recognition. The rules behind this balance were flexible, but collective consensus always retained the upper hand. The balance tipped only with Pompey’s enormous theatre complex on the Campus Martius. The complex created a new type of public space, and it set the precedent for Caesar, who took on the challenge of competition with his own Forum project. Such an omnipresent dynamic of increase provoked heavy polemics and fierce conflict, but this violence was not only tolerated but reckoned with as a possibility from the very start. It appeared more appropriate to accept repeated violation of tradition while still affirming it than to develop a fundamentally different, new ‘system’ of norms and behaviours. The mode of permanent transgression was indicative not only of a political culture in crisis but also of a culture of crisis.