scholarly journals La fotografia nel museo d’arte a fine Ottocento: sovrapposizioni e occasioni per una rinnovata filologia visiva. Alcuni spunti

2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (10) ◽  
pp. 60-80
Author(s):  
Donata Levi

The article deals with the effects of photography on the practices of art historians, focusing on some German cases. Photography, defined by Paul de Saint-Victor in 1887 as the “musée en action de l’art européen,” offered unprecedented opportunities for a renewed visual philology. Yet this evolution was more complex and less unidirectional than is generally thought. The illustrated publications of Gustav Scheuer in the 1860s attest to different ways of manipulating photographic images and illuminate the connections between photography and comparative methods, which initially concerned the relationships between original paintings and photographs much more than those among paintings themselves.

Author(s):  
Imre Pozsgai ◽  
Klara Erdöhalmi-Torok

The paintings by the great Hungarian master Mihaly Munkacsy (1844-1900) made in an 8-9 years period of his activity are deteriorating. The most conspicuous sign of the deterioration is an intensive darkening. We have made an attempt by electron beam microanalysis to clarify the causes of the darkening. The importance of a study like this is increased by the fact that a similar darkening can be observed on the paintings by Munkacsy’s contemporaries e.g Courbet and Makart. A thick brown mass the so called bitumen used by Munkacsy for grounding and also as a paint is believed by the art historians to cause the darkening.For this study, paint specimens were taken from the following paintings: “Studio”, “Farewell” and the “Portrait of the Master’s Wife”, all of them are the property of the Hungarian National Gallery. The paint samples were embedded in a polyester resin “Poly-Pol PS-230” and after grinding and polishing their cross section was used for x-ray mapping.


Moreana ◽  
1977 ◽  
Vol 14 (Number 55-5 (3) ◽  
pp. 55-56
Author(s):  
Aubrey Noakes
Keyword(s):  

2013 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 111-115 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wendy Babcox

Every Olive Tree in the Garden of Gethsemane is a suite of photographic images of each of the twenty-three olive trees in the garden. Situated at the foot of the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem, the Garden of Gethsemane is known to many as the site where Jesus and his disciples prayed the night before his crucifixion. The oldest trees in the garden date to 1092 and are recognized as some of the oldest olive trees in existence. The older trees are a living and symbolic connection to the distant past, while younger trees serve as a link to the future. The gnarled trunks seem written with the many conflicts that have been waged in an effort to control this most-contested city; a city constantly on the threshold of radical transformation.


Author(s):  
David Morgan

Traditionally, art historians have relied on iconography, biography, and connoisseurship as the fundamental means of studying images. These approaches and methods stress the singularity of an image, its authenticity, and its authorship; therefore, they reflect an enduring debt to the humanist tradition of individualism. The image is understood principally as the product of the unique and privileged inspiration of an individual artist and is regarded as a measure of this individual's genius. Iconographical and biographical research secure authorial intent; connoisseurship authenticates the work. While this scholarly apparatus certainly offers the art historian indispensable tools, it is important to understand that its commitment to original intent is singularly ill-equipped to assess the reception of images, the ongoing history of response that keeps images alive within a culture from generation to generation.


2015 ◽  
Vol 60 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-38
Author(s):  
Michael J. Golec

In analysing Lester Beall's posters for the U.S. government between 1937-1941, Michael Golec demonstrates the twofold character of facts in art and design appearing even when they are applied to guarantee distinct messages. Commissioned by the governmental agencies to develop a series of posters to increase the electrification of rural farms, Beall introduces pictograms in his first series to represent electrification as “facts of the future.” Its simple forms facilitate the travelling of this facts without loss of their integrity. The same holds true for the use of photographic images for the second campaign of 1939. Following the revaluation of photography as a means for the documentation of social reality, as represented by the FSA photographers under the guidance of Roy Stryker, the medium served here as the authentication of facts. Golec holds, that Beall by reducing the complexity of the photographic images, to create a pictorial integrity of his posters, even despite of the use of a seemingly documentary medium, reinforces the ambivalent factual character of the pictures. So, paradoxically by heightening the communicative character of the design and hence stressing the idea of facts as integral realities outside of artworks, Beall's posters reveal the ambiguous character of pictorial facts creating their own specific qualities. Golec concludes, that facts in works of art and design have a twofold character resulting from their belonging to different spaces, which although meant to accomplish and address different facts, inevitably travel, overlap and bleed into each other. Thus oddly these facts refer or represent reality and simultaneously are a thing made (factum) that present and hold their own pictorial reality.


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