scholarly journals Rubens’sLife of Maria de’ Medici:Dissimulation and the Politics of Art in Early Seventeenth-Century France*

2014 ◽  
Vol 67 (3) ◽  
pp. 878-916 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sara Galletti
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Access To Information ◽  
Peter Paul Rubens ◽  
Spatial Control ◽  
Political Ideas ◽  
Large Size ◽  
Baroque Art ◽  
Physical Access ◽  
Queen Mother

AbstractTheLife of Maria de’ Medici,the biographical series of twenty-four large-size paintings executed for the Queen Mother of France by Peter Paul Rubens in 1622–25, is traditionally regarded by historians as both a masterpiece of Baroque art and a monument of political naïveté. According to this view, the series was a disrespectful visual bravado that exposed both patron and painter to scandal by publicly advertising the queen’s political ideas and ambitions, which were not only audacious, but often in opposition to those of her son King Louis XIII. This article challenges this assessment by reading theLifewithin the context of seventeenth-century uses of dissimulation and spatial control as strategies to limit both intellectual and physical access to information. It argues that the series was imbued with multiple layers of meaning, intended for different audiences, and that access to these was strictly controlled by the queen and her circle.

Technologies of Democracy: Participation and Access in the University Environment

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephanie Hall ◽  
Naida Caidi
Keyword(s):  
Digital Divide ◽  
Internet Use ◽  
Access To Information ◽  
Canadian Government ◽  
University Environment ◽  
Per Capita ◽  
Statistics Canada ◽  
The University ◽  
Physical Access

Although Canada globally ranks among the top ten countries for per capita Internet use (ITU, 2001; Statistics Canada, 2002), roughly one half of the population is till not online. The Canadian government has supported numerous initiatives aimed at bridging the 'digital divide' between technological haves and have-nots, recognizing, at the same time, that simple physical access to information. . .

Figuring Faith and Female Power in the Art of Rubens

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. Vanessa Lyon
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Attitudes Toward Women ◽  
Court Culture ◽  
Peter Paul Rubens ◽  
Catholic Theology ◽  
Historical Scholarship ◽  
Cultural Attitudes ◽  
Female Power

Figuring Faith and Female Power in the Art of Rubens argues that the Baroque painter, propagandist, and diplomat, Peter Paul Rubens, was not only aware of rapidly shifting religious and cultural attitudes toward women, but actively engaged in shaping them. Today, Rubens’s paintings continue to be used -- and abused -- to prescribe and proscribe certain forms of femininity. Repositioning some of the artist’s best-known works within seventeenth-century Catholic theology and female court culture, this book provides a feminist corrective to a body of art historical scholarship in which studies of gender and religion are often mutually exclusive. Moving chronologically through Rubens’s lengthy career, the author shows that, in relation to the powerful women in his life, Rubens figured the female form as a transhistorical carrier of meaning whose devotional and rhetorical efficacy was heightened rather than diminished by notions of female difference and particularity.

Rondinini paintings rediscovered: A self-portrait by Paul Bril and a ‘witchcraft’ by Pieter van Laer

2018 ◽  
Vol 31 (2) ◽  
pp. 333-341
Author(s):  
Cristiano Giometti ◽  
Loredana Lorizzo
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Collaborative Research ◽  
Research Project ◽  
History Of Collecting ◽  
Large Size ◽  
History Of ◽  
Dutch Painter

Abstract The Rondinini family is important for having developed a well-defined taste in collecting during the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries, with an interest in ancient sculpture and painting staged in their palaces and villas in Rome and its surroundings. The most eminent artists active in seventeenth-century Rome worked for them. The paintings presented here are the most relevant examples of a great number of works that have re-emerged during a collaborative research project conducted by the universities of Florence and Salerno on the family’s contributions to the history of collecting. The first is a signed self-portrait by the Flemish artist Paul Bril, a pioneer amongst the landscape painters active in Rome between the late 1500s and early 1600s – a work of large size for the artist (110.0 x 81.5 cm); the second is a ‘witchcraft crowded with figures’ painted by Pieter van Laer, an eminent Dutch painter and leader of the group of masters called the ‘Bamboccianti’.

scholarly journals ‘Colouring’ — Material Depiction in Flemish and Dutch Baroque Art Theory

2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 243-265
Author(s):  
Lisa Wiersma
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Modern Art ◽  
Surface Effects ◽  
17Th Century ◽  
Art Theory ◽  
Generic Term ◽  
Baroque Art ◽  
Human Flesh

Seventeenth-century painters were masters at painting objects and beings that seem tangible. Most elaborate was painting translucent materials like skins and pulp: human flesh and grapes, for instance, require various surface effects and suggest the presence of mass below the upper layers. Thus, the viewer is more or less convinced that a volume or object is present in an illusionary space. In Dutch, the word ‘stofuitdrukking’ is used: expression or indication of material, perhaps better understood as rendering of material. In English, ‘material depiction’ probably captures this painterly means best: it includes rendering of surface effects, while revealing the underlying substance, and it implies that weight and mass are suggested. Simple strokes of paint add up to materials and things that are convincingly percieved. At first glance, material depiction hardly seems a topic in early-modern art theory, yet 17th-century painters are virtually unequalled as regards this elaborate skill. Therefore, 17th-century written sources were studied to define how these might discuss material depiction, if not distinctly. This study concerns one of many questions regarding the incredible convincingness of 17th-century material depiction: besides wondering why the illusions work (Di Cicco et al., this issue) and how these were achieved (Wiersma, in press), the question should be asked why this convincingness was sought after. Was it mere display of ability and skill? And how was material depiction perceived, valued and enjoyed? First, contemporary terminology is determined: the seemingly generic term ‘colouring’ signified the application of convincing material depiction especially — which is not as self-evident as it sounds. Second, and extensively, the reader will find that convincing or appealing material depiction was considered a reference to religion and natural philosophy.

scholarly journals Catholic Political Thought and Calvinist Ecclesiology in Samuel Rutherford's Lex, Rex (1644)

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-23
Author(s):  
Karie Schultz
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Civil Wars ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Popular Sovereignty ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Political Ideas ◽  
Law Of Nations ◽  
Human Liberty ◽  
The Church ◽  
Civil Government

Abstract This article presents a significant reinterpretation of an essential text in Scottish (and British) political thought, Samuel Rutherford's Lex, Rex, by analyzing its relationship with Catholic scholasticism. While scholars have observed Rutherford's use of Catholic authors, there has been no sustained analysis of how Rutherford strategically applied this intellectual tradition to the religious and political context of the British civil wars. Ideas about human liberty, the law of nations, and popular sovereignty that were developed by Catholic scholastics in the School of Salamanca allowed Rutherford to defend limited monarchy and fulfill an ecclesiological purpose in seventeenth-century Britain. He, and the majority of his Covenanter contemporaries, believed in jure divino presbyterianism: scripture mandated that elders and synods, not bishops, should rule the church. To ensure a presbyterian settlement, Rutherford needed to disprove royalist absolutists who claimed that presbyterianism threatened absolute monarchy (the divinely ordained form of civil government) by limiting royal supremacy over the church. By building on Catholic scholastic political ideas, Rutherford was able to argue that human beings could change the form of civil government and that absolute monarchy was not required by God. Ironically, to make a civil state safe for presbyterianism, Rutherford resorted to Catholic scholastics rather than those of his own confessional tradition. This analysis urges reconsideration of not only the porosity of traditional confessional boundaries in early modern political thought but the respective positions of both Calvinism and Catholicism in shaping the political ideas underlying the British revolutions of the mid-seventeenth century.

The Problem of Advice in Muscovite Tales about the Time of Troubles

2020 ◽  
pp. 54-81
Author(s):  
Daniel B. Rowland
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Russian History ◽  
Historical Sources ◽  
Positive Evidence ◽  
The Troubles ◽  
Old Russian ◽  
Political Ideas ◽  
The Awakening ◽  
Time Of Troubles

This chapter mentions celebrated Russian historian V. O. Kliuchevskii, who complained that S. F. Platonov's Old Russian tales and stories about the time of troubles of the seventeenth-century had lacked significant aspects, such as political ideas. It analyses political ideas that could have been in Platonov's work that illustrated the awakening and development of political thought under the influence of the Troubles. It also talks about Kliuchevskii's famous Course in Russian History, where he commented extensively on new political ideas and cast them into a constitutional framework. The chapter suggests that the reason Kliuchevskii failed to produce positive evidence from Platonov's tales in support of his position is that they simply do not reflect the kind of constitutional sentiment he claimed to find in other historical sources. It describes the legal-institutional approach that Kliuchevskii brought to the problem that led him to treat Platonov's tales as a negative echo of ideas.

Perspective as a Conceptual Tool in Milton and Newton

2020 ◽  
pp. 132-162
Author(s):  
Erin Webster
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Paradise Lost ◽  
Human Perception ◽  
Multiple Perspectives ◽  
Conceptual Tool ◽  
Infinitesimal Calculus ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Baroque Art ◽  
Art And Architecture ◽  
The Universe

This chapter reads John Milton’s use of vast shifts in perspective in Paradise Lost (1667) in relation to seventeenth-century developments in the mathematics of infinity and infinitesimals. In a period in which telescopes and microscopes promised to extend the eye’s reach indefinitely, this chapter shows that Milton’s use of the epic simile and Newton’s infinitesimal calculus, first published as an attachment to his optical treatise, Opticks (1704), are related attempts to express concepts that continue to exceed the limits of visual comprehension: the infinitely large, the infinitesimally small, and the paradoxical relationship between the two. The chapter places these two writers’ work within the context of baroque art and architecture, which similarly exploits perspective as a means of expressing the concept of an infinite universe held in tension with the limits of human perception. Ultimately, it argues that by requiring his readers to vacillate between multiple perspectives on the same object, Milton contributes to a broader cultural decentring of the earth-bound human perspective as the standard measure of the universe.

"Risk literacy" and social cleavages: Vulnerability in three acts

2021 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Tom Hashimoto ◽  
◽  
Aras Zirgulis ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Digital Divide ◽  
Risk Perceptions ◽  
Analytical Tool ◽  
Access To Information ◽  
Social Cleavages ◽  
Contemporary World ◽  
The Third ◽  
The World ◽  
Risk Literacy ◽  
Physical Access

Although recent studies show widening socio-economic divisions due to the COVID-19 pandemic, many such divisions were already identified as social cleavages. Scholars and observers tend to view the world in a dichotomous manner, overgeneralising their analyses along known cleavages. Therefore, the relevance of our work as scholars is at risk and we, the scholars of the contemporary world, are “vulnerable” to the temptation of ignoring the details, nuances, and complexities. The uneven impact of and recovery from the pandemic is not necessarily binary – for example, a refusal to follow the medical consensus (e.g. social distancing, vaccination) can be observed on both sides of many cleavages. Against such a background, this paper first characterises the pandemic as a medical, socio-economic, and information crisis. With the former two “pillars” resembling the known cleavages, the third pillar goes beyond the physical access to information and deals with the people’s perception of various risks. Such a behavioural angle to the vulnerability – labelled “risk literacy” – highlights the phenomenon of “digital divide” and shows a promising feature as an additional analytical tool. By familiarising ourselves with the people’s varying risk perceptions, we increase our own literacy against the risk of overgeneralisation.

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