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‘Complexities, conflicts, and cooperations in a shared cultural space’. Review of: The Museum Age in Austria-Hungary: Art and Empire in the Long Nineteenth Century, by Matthew Rampley, Markian Prokopovych, and Nóra Veszprémi,University Park, Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2021, 290pp., 47 b. & w. illus., 39.95 pbk ISBN 9780271087108.
Full text linkThe historiography of the fine arts museum in Europe is a narrative that has mostly followed the arc of the developing nation-state after the French Revolution. This approach has often focused on the emergence of the public museum as part of an ‘exhibitionary complex’ that helped to shape an ‘imagined community’ of patriotic citizens during the long nineteenth century. For the most part these nationally-based perspectives have been extremely productive, but they cannot do justice to many of the museums that emerged in the Austro-Hungarian Empire before its collapse. Indeed, the three authors of this excellent volume remind us that many of the ‘national’ fine arts museums of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire took shape well before the outbreak of war in 1914 and only took on their official status as representatives of their specific ‘nations’ in the years after 1918. Thus, the historiography of museums in central Europe needs a more nuanced approach. As the volume’s editor and contributor Matthew Rampley writes, ‘current state boundaries are not a meaningful framework for the study of museums in Habsburg Central Europe.’
This volume both suggests and models that new framework. To make their point the authors use several, more complicated (social, trans-national, and local) approaches to demonstrate how museums in the Empire’s important cities (Lemberg, Prague, Budapest, Cracow, and Zagreb) emerged from a complex set of Imperial, local and, as the century progressed, civic and nationalist ambitions. Together the authors unanimously argue in favor of viewing Austria-Hungary as a ‘shared cultural space’ with complex interactions that formed a web of relationships across the many nationalities of the Empire—a web that remains invisible to the post-1945 observer.
This invitation to complexity is both convincing and compelling and it opens a broad field of new research possibilities. Well-written and exquisitely researched, the volume also inadvertently highlights one of the greatest challenges to future scholars: fluency in the local languages. We are grateful to these authors to have given us this volume in English. Insofar as it models several museological approaches, it can be useful to any scholar who is interested in the historiography of museums in Europe’s long nineteenth century
‘Medieval Islamic objects and the architecture of the mind’. Review of: Arts of Allusion: Object, Ornament, and Architecture in Medieval Islam by Margaret S. Graves, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018, 339 pp., over 100 col. plates and b. & w. illus., £68 hdbk, Print ISBN 9780190695910, Online ISBN 9780190695941.
Full text linkThis review examines the monograph of Margaret Graves, Arts of Allusion, which offers a nuanced argument about visual representation in a disparate group of portable objects dating to between the ninth and thirteenth centuries and created in the heartland of the medieval Islamic world. The study focuses on what Graves calls ‘archimorphic objects’: portable objects that reference architecture in some way, either through their form or ornament. While many studies have pointed to intriguing formal similarities between small objects and monumental buildings in the medieval Islamic tradition, Graves breaks new ground in her exploration of what the allusion to monumental architecture in portable art reveals about the viewers and makers of these objects. Her detailed analyses of numerous objects that were both quotidian and fabulously crafted demonstrates the importance of allusion, metaphor, and other indirect forms of expression to the mechanics of representation in both visual and literary arts in medieval Islamic civilization
Notes on Franz Wickhoff’s School and Max Dvořák’s Italian Renaissance studies based on new archival materials
Full text linkThe article deals with Franz Wickhoff´s influence on Max Dvořák´s formulation of his late method of art history today widely known as ‘Kunstgeschichte als Geistesgeschichte’. The article proposes a thesis that already in Wickhoff´s thinking an inclination toward the ‘geistesgeschichtliche’ interpretation of art history can be evident, as shown on a comparison between his and Dvořák´s interest in the Italian Renaissance art. The other way of Wickhoff´s influence on Dvořák´s art history is shown as grounded in their deep personal relationship that is documented in their mutual correspondence from the early 20th century, recently rediscovered in the Archive of the Institute of Art History of the Vienna University
Low Emission (Clean Air) Zone Toolkit
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Transcriptions and Synopsis of Selected Witnesses for the Pseudo-Oecumenian Catena on Romans
No full textTranscriptions of eight Greek manuscripts of the Pseudo-Oecumenian Catena on Romans (CPG C165), consisting of the following New Testament witnesses: GA 91, 627, 1862, 1905, 1919, 1923, 1980, 1997.
Synopses of the three types of catena scholia: normal, extravagantes, Photiana.
Created in conjunction with a doctoral thesis submitted to the University of Birmingham in 2023
Air pollution exposure in different transport modes
Full text linkIn this Briefing Note, we summarise recent scientific evidence on air pollution exposure experienced by people travelling by different surface transport modes: including road, rail, and active travel (walking and cycling). We also consider which factors influence pollutant exposure within each mode and provide recommendations to mitigate against adverse health impacts
Musealisation and ethno-cultural stereotypes in Persian art: the case of Baluch carpets ca. 1870s – 1930s
Full text linkThis study examines Baluch carpets’ musealisation and the prejudiced view that carpets woven by Persians are superior to the carpets of tribal groups– a view expressed in 1876 by Robert Murdoch Smith in the exhibition catalogue of the Persian collection he had purchased for the South Kensington Museum. To do so, travel memoirs, museum registers and exhibition catalogues in European and US museums ca. 1870s-19030s are revisited. The scope is to refine Baluch weavings as museum objects and delineate how tribal carpets were integrated in museums within ethno-cultural stereotypes in Persian art and the re-discussion between ‘fine’ and ‘applied’ arts
Rethinking the so-called Polish carpets
Full text linkThe so-called Polish carpets were once believed to be woven on Polish looms, even though—as we now understand—they were (most likely) manufactured in the Persian cities of Kashan and Isfahan. Yet, the misattribution of these objects’ origins is still evident in the phrase by which they are referred to in most English-language art-historical accounts, ‘the so-called Polish carpets’. This essay explores the history of conceptualising these carpets’ artistic geography, from art historians’ belief in their fictional Polish provenience, to their appreciation as some of the most valuable Safavid-era Persian carpets, to recent attempts to move away from defining these objects’ geographic roots in definite terms. With conflicting theories about their artistic geographies vying for attention, ‘the so-called Polish carpets’ are serving here as a springboard for rethinking the spatial dimension of the practice of naming in Art History, particularly the paradox inherent in the idea of artistic origins
An historiographic contextualization of Leo Steinberg’s “Observations in the Cerasi Chapel
Full text linkIn recent decades, Leo Steinberg’s 1959 article ‘Observations in the Cerasi Chapel’ has been variously characterized as brilliant, extraordinarily insightful, and classic, but its methodological origins and implications have never been studied in detail. A close look at Steinberg’s piece reveals relevant antecedents in the writings of several earlier German-language art historians and significant contemporary parallels in Anglophone art writing. But the article, written when Steinberg was better known as an art critic than as an art historian, also provocatively blurred the boundaries between those disciplines and challenged mid-century analytical models. Moreover, Steinberg’s emphasis upon mobile, embodied viewership was soon embraced in the practices of Robert Morris and Alice Aycock, both of whom he taught. An analysis of the contexts in which Steinberg developed his ideas and in which they were received thus complicates and enriches his own account of the genesis of his article, and reveals a complex course of methodological affinities and innovations
‘Dialogic art history’. Review of: Vessels: The Object as Container, edited by Claudia Brittenham, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019, 196pp, 78 col. plates, 23 b. & w. illus., £38.49 ISBN 9780198832577; Conditions of Visibility, edited by Richard Neer, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019, 168pp, 66 col. plates, £24.99 ISBN 9780198845560; Figurines: Figuration and the Sense of Scale, edited by Jaś Elsner, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020, 208pp, 77 col. plates, £36.49 ISBN 9780198861096; Landscape and Space: Comparative Perspectives from Chinese, Mesoamerican, Ancient Greek, and Roman Art, edited by Jaś Elsner, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021, 208pp, 95 col. plates, £65.00 ISBN 9780192845955. Visual Conversations in Art and Archaeology Series.
Full text linkThis review discussed four volumes under the Oxford University Press’s series ‘Visual Conversations in Art and Archaeology’: Vessels: The Object as Container, Conditions of Visibility, Figurines: Figuration and the Sense of Scale, and Landscape and Space: Comparative Perspectives from Chinese, Mesoamerican, Ancient Greek, and Roman Art. It assessed the extent to which what the authors of this series termed ‘comparativism of method’ could be a viable approach to tackle long-grained epistemic asymmetries in art-historical methodologies and productively advance a global art history. The volumes succeed in relativising and revising presumed universality of Eurocentric concepts such as ‘figurine’ and ‘landscape’ for a more inclusive discussion in the future, while offering constructive, multidirectional dialogues across regional specialisms. The review further pointed out several limits to the comparativism proposed by the series: specifically the boundary between method and personality in scholarship, the danger of intensifying inequalities of academic resources and infrastructures between the Global North and the Global South, and the need to further open up such dialogues to practitioners outside of ancient art and archaeology
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