Critical History of Art, or Transfiguration of Values?

1972 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
pp. 459 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kurt W. Forster
2020 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
pp. 271-309
Author(s):  
Federica Volpera

The archive of the Pinacoteca Civica in Savona preserved an unpublished typescript about the painter Ludovico Brea (Nice, 1450 c.-1516/1525): this work was written between 1911 and 1912 by the art historian Piero Hierschel De Minerbi, who belonged to a noble family from Trieste. The study of the text, illustrated by seventy-seven black and white photos, and four tables featuring sketches by the author, enables not only to add a new element to the critical history of Ludovico Brea but also to reflect on the state of the history of art criticism in Italy at the beginning of the Twentieth century. Particularly research tools used by the scholar belong to Historical and Philological method of the connoiseurship as was formulated by Adolfo Venturi (1856-1941) and Pietro Toesca (1877-1962): beyond the choice of a specific genre as the artist’s monograph, and of a research topic focused on an artist who belonged to a peripheral area of Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-century Italian Art, De Minerbi’s method is characterized by the enhancement of the link between history and criticism, a deep attention to the formal and technical aspects of the paintings in order to identify Brea’s style and to reconstruct his catalogue, distinguishing his hands from those of his followers, and the use of research instruments as archival documents, photography and ink sketches of compositional and iconographic details. Finally, some unpublished letters written by Piero De Minerbi and the director of the Pinacoteca Civica in Savona, Poggio Poggi, between 1938 and 1940, enable to reconstruct the history of this typescripts and the reason of its presence in the archive of the museum.


2018 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 252-267
Author(s):  
Kuniichi Uno

For Gilles Deleuze's two essays ‘Causes and Reasons of Desert Islands’ and ‘Michel Tournier and the World Without Others’, the crucial question is what the perception is, what its fundamental conditions are. A desert island can be a place to experiment on this question. The types of perception are described in many critical works about the history of art and aesthetical reflections by artists. So I will try to retrace some types of perception especially linked to the ‘haptic’, the importance of which was rediscovered by Deleuze. The ‘haptic’ proposes a type of perception not linked to space, but to time in its aspects of genesis. And something incorporeal has to intervene in a very original stage of perception and of perception of time. Thus we will be able to capture some links between the fundamental aspects of perception and time in its ‘out of joint’ aspects (Aion).


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
William Abbiss

This article offers a ‘post-heritage’ reading of both iterations of Upstairs Downstairs: the LondonWeekend Television (LWT) series (1971–5) and its shortlived BBC revival (2010–12). Identifying elements of subversion and subjectivity allows scholarship on the LWT series to be reassessed, recognising occasions where it challenges rather than supports the social structures of the depicted Edwardian past. The BBC series also incorporates the post-heritage element of self-consciousness, acknowledging the parallel between its narrative and the production’s attempts to recreate the success of its 1970s predecessor. The article’s first section assesses the critical history of the LWT series, identifying areas that are open to further study or revised readings. The second section analyses the serialised war narrative of the fourth series of LWT’s Upstairs, Downstairs (1974), revealing its exploration of female identity across multiple episodes and challenging the notion that the series became more male and upstairs dominated as it progressed. The third section considers the BBC series’ revised concept, identifying the shifts in its main characters’ positions in society that allow the series’ narrative to question the past it evokes. This will be briefly contrasted with the heritage stability of Downton Abbey (ITV, 2010–15). The final section considers the household of 165 Eaton Place’s function as a studio space, which the BBC series self-consciously adopts in order to evoke the aesthetics of prior period dramas. The article concludes by suggesting that the barriers to recreating the past established in the BBC series’ narrative also contributed to its failure to match the success of its earlier iteration.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
William Abbiss

This article offers a ‘post-heritage’ reading of both iterations of Upstairs Downstairs: the LondonWeekend Television (LWT) series (1971–5) and its shortlived BBC revival (2010–12). Identifying elements of subversion and subjectivity allows scholarship on the LWT series to be reassessed, recognising occasions where it challenges rather than supports the social structures of the depicted Edwardian past. The BBC series also incorporates the post-heritage element of self-consciousness, acknowledging the parallel between its narrative and the production’s attempts to recreate the success of its 1970s predecessor. The article’s first section assesses the critical history of the LWT series, identifying areas that are open to further study or revised readings. The second section analyses the serialised war narrative of the fourth series of LWT’s Upstairs, Downstairs (1974), revealing its exploration of female identity across multiple episodes and challenging the notion that the series became more male and upstairs dominated as it progressed. The third section considers the BBC series’ revised concept, identifying the shifts in its main characters’ positions in society that allow the series’ narrative to question the past it evokes. This will be briefly contrasted with the heritage stability of Downton Abbey (ITV, 2010–15). The final section considers the household of 165 Eaton Place’s function as a studio space, which the BBC series self-consciously adopts in order to evoke the aesthetics of prior period dramas. The article concludes by suggesting that the barriers to recreating the past established in the BBC series’ narrative also contributed to its failure to match the success of its earlier iteration.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document