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Eric Schroeder: maverick polymath
Full text linkThe article surveys the life and output of Eric Schroeder (1904-71), who served from 1938 as (mainly honorary) Keeper of Persian Art at the Fogg Museum of Art, Harvard University, mounting choice exhibitions and greatly expanding the collection of paintings. After assessing his two major books – Persian Miniatures in the Fogg Museum of Art (1942) and Muhammad’s People. An Anthology (1955) – the focus shifts to his chapters and articles on Persian architecture and book painting. His remarkable range, profound erudition, flood of original insights and peerless prose explains why his best work, as relevant today as ever, should be required reading for students of Islamic art
The rekhta of architecture: the development of ‘Islamic’ art history in Urdu, c.1800-1950
Full text linkThis essay offers the first survey of architectural history after the Muslim conquests in the Indian Subcontinent in Urdu, the major Muslim literary language of colonial India. Contributing to the history of art history in non-European contexts, the essay traces the emergence of a deliberately ‘Islamic’ art history as the outcome of intellectual exchanges between Indian, European, and Middle Eastern authors. Reflecting this mixed provenance, the popular and scholarly texts examined here are termed ‘architectural rekhta’ by using the old name for Urdu (Rekhta: ‘mixed’). In apt architectural metonymy, ‘Rekhta’ was renamed ‘Urdu’ in homage to the Urdu-e Mu‘ala (or Red Fort of Delhi), revealing a conceptual link between the palace of the last Mughal emperors and Urdu as its language based on the centrality of buildings to Indo-Muslim cultural memory. Consequently, when colonial Muslim authors combined elements of European practice with their own concerns to produce their ‘mixed’ mode of art historical writing, architecture became their primary focus. In line with the themes of this special issue of the JAH, this approach examines the ‘post-Persianate’ cultural memory of Indian art of the Islamic period
The ‘Iran’ Curtain: the historiography of Abu’l-Khairid (Shaybanid) arts of the book and the ‘Bukhara School’ during the Cold War
Full text linkIn treating illustrated Persian-language manuscript arts from the medieval and early-modern periods, dynasties have come to be associated with Iran and their art forms labelled ‘Persian’ and ‘Iranian’. Materials from sixteenth-century Central Asia— implying the Abu’l-Khairid dynasty (commonly called Shaybanid Uzbek, in power 1500—1599)—challenge this classification. Scholarship has witnessed intellectual fissures dividing Iran from Central Asia, and Russian-speaking and Anglophone scholars from each other. These are not pedantic trivialities, but deliberate intrusions of national and political agendas into art historical analyses. The geographic split partitioning Iran from Central Asia has its origins in the historical battles waged between the Safavids and Abu’l-Khairids across the sixteenth century, while the linguistic and ideological rift separating English- and Russian-language academics stems from political divisions from the time of British and Romanov imperial ambitions during the late nineteenth century, through Cold-War tensions spanning the twentieth
Dashi 大食 reconsidered
Full text linkThis essay is a critical survey of relevant Song dynasty sources that are essential to an understanding of the term Dashi 大食. Scholars in the nineteenth century identified Dashi in Tang dynasty writings as a designation for Arab Muslims. This definition consequently has been and is being applied to all occurrences of Dashi in Song dynasty texts. However, Dashi in the Song no longer described Arab Muslims, but, as a multivalent term, referred to a variety of peoples and places in Central Asia, Southeast Asia, and South Asia. Contrary to commonly held view, Dashi falls short of providing evidence for an Arab controlled maritime trade from South Asia to China that contemporary scholars suggest. The paper, therefore, calls for a re-evaluation of the alleged Arab influence in Asian maritime trade networks during the tenth to the twelfth centuries, and a closer reading of the Chinese source material
Health impacts of air pollution in Birmingham
Full text linkWM Air Briefing Note B34-CS-2023-07, June 2023.
Contact: https://wm-air.org.uk; @WMAir_UoB; [email protected]
WM-Air - Clean Air Science for the West Midlands (wm-air.org.uk) is a NERC funded initiative, led by the University of Birmingham. The programme, in collaboration with over 20 cross sector partners, applies environmental science expertise to support improvement of air quality, health, environmental and economic benefits, in the West Midlands.
Research conducted by WM-Air has quantified the impacts of air pollution in Birmingham on a range of health conditions – including asthma, heart disease, stroke, lung cancer and risk of early death. Calculations were performed using the Air Quality Life Assessment Tool (AQ-LAT) developed within the WM-Air programme. For a detailed description of methods and to download the tool visit https://wm-air.org.uk/project/health/
A positive apparatus of Family Π in Mark
No full textA collation of 27 Greek Manuscripts of the Gospel according to Mark in conjunction with a doctoral thesis submitted to the University of Birmingham in 2023
Vasari and portraiture: function, aesthetics and propaganda
Full text linkThis article examines how portraiture is presented in Giorgio Vasari’s Lives (1550 and 1568). The Lives claims portraits are to remember the dead and instruct the living; to do this, they must be accurate copies of the sitter. Praising portraits as copies effectively endorses the often-promotional messages of the portraits themselves. However, the book praises some portraits as beautiful and miraculous works in neoplatonic terms. The idealism of neoplatonism is at odds with the requirement to have an accurate copy of the sitter and this apparent contradiction can be understood as a consequence of the unstated purpose of the Lives; to propagandise on behalf of Cosimo I de’ Medici’s Florence. The portraits of the Medici and their associates are praised as both lifelike and exceptional, and thus readers are encouraged to believe that the sitters are actually exceptional
Conference report: ‘Art history and its institutions in the Austro-Hungarian Empire’ 28th-30th September 2023
Full text linkThe conference Art History and Its Institutions in the Austro-Hungarian Empire marked the 150th anniversary of the establishment in 1873 of the Commission of Art History of the Academy of Science and Arts in Cracow andwas held at the Wawel Royal Castle between 28th and 30th September 2023. The papers presented within four panel dealt with the institutional context of establishing the discipline, biographies of particular researchers and institutional mechanisms, art historical mileus and narratives around them and, last but not least, extra-European archaeology and art history
‘Neutral observer or institutionalized voice? Willibald Sauerländer and German art history after 1945‘. Review of: Willibald Sauerländer und die Kunstgeschichte, Franz Hefele/Ulrich Pfisterer (eds.), Passau: Dietmar Klinger Verlag 2022 (Veröffentlichungen des Zentralinstituts für Kunstgeschichte in München 54). ISBN 978-3-86328-186-1
Full text linkThe volume Willibald Sauerländer und die Kunstgeschichte highlightsthe academic career of one of the more influential German art historians of the twentieth century, who for nearly twenty years headed the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte in Munich. It focuses on his contributions to the study of Gothic art and later periods, and also highlights his methodological innovations in these fields. At the same time, many contributions implicitly or explicitly discuss his choices in the context of post-WW II Western Germany, and the way political debates influenced the development of art history. The explicit call for methodological denazification, as voiced in the 1970s by young academics such as Martin Warnke, was not followed by the slightly older Willibald Sauerländer, who opted to distance himself more implicitly from the previous generation. It was only after his retirement in 1989 that he openly reflected upon his experiences in the immediate post-war period, and even then adopted the position of a neutral observer, even if by then he had already embarked upon an impressive academic career. As such, this volume suggests how institutional history, individual careers and politics intersected in the second half of the twentieth century
Endosmosis: bio-geographical sources of a World Art History
Full text linkThe establishment of non-European art historical scholarship at the University of Vienna narrates the influence of turn of the twentieth century German academic exchanges between natural sciences and the humanities. A reading of the historiographical approaches of the works of its scholars, Josef Strzygowski (1862-1941), Ernst Diez (1878-1961) and Heinrich Glück (1889-1930) on Islamic, Byzantine, Persian, Armenian and Turkish art histories connect to recent biological and geographical research centred at the University of Leipzig. Their works unfold a new understanding of the world’s art geography consequential to the influence of biogeographical approaches of Friedrich Ratzel (1844-1904) and read parallels to Ratzel’s impact on the universal historical approaches Karl Lamprecht (1856-1915) and the Diffusionist school in anthropology, in which the world geography is imagined as an intelligible organism with migratory and adaptive mechanisms. The approach made possible for these scholars of the Vienna School to take in account of the previously uncharted areas of art history, by tracing flows and interactions of art forms. The discussion on the biogeographical approaches of Diez, Glück and Strzygowski opens new perspectives into the history of world art history and challenges the colonial and the ethnographical emphasis on the museological, object-based premise of non-European art historiography
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