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Playing Goddess: A Study of Roman Women Associated with the Goddess Venus
No full textThesis (B.A. in History, Minor in Classical Studies)--John Cabot University, Spring 2025.Throughout the years of the empire, and a few before its establishment, Roman women were associated with the goddess Venus in ways that seem to contradict the expectations placed on them by society. This thesis explores the seemingly odd ways that women in the Roman empire were portrayed in the guise of or associated with the goddess Venus across different mediums. Previous scholarship considers the depictions separately but does not consider them together as a narrative being told largely in the city of Rome. This inquiry aims to fill this gap by exploring the connections between the different depictions and the way that ancient Romans may have considered these seemingly odd depictions as a normal occurrence. It does this by considering a variety of different case studies in literature, numismatics and statuary. This research aims to show that these depictions of women as Venus not only make sense within a larger narrative but that, upon further inspection, they were not odd for the Romans
Luxury Apparel and “Made in China”: A Case Study Comparing Sustainable Production in Italy and China
No full textThis study explores the intersection of sustainability, transparency, and outsourcing in the luxury fashion industry, with a comparative focus on Italy and China. By examining the environmental, ethical, and branding implications of production strategies employed by leading luxury brands, the research highlights the challenges of maintaining exclusivity while adhering to sustainable practices. Drawing on case studies, industry reports, and regulatory analysis, the study investigates how outsourcing production to emerging markets affects brand reputation, stakeholder trust, and consumer behavior in the international luxury apparel sector. The findings indicate that while Italy remains synonymous with quality craftsmanship, increasing outsourcing to China—often accompanied by insufficient transparency—risks undermining sustainability claims and eroding consumer trust. The paper concludes with policy and branding recommendations for luxury firms seeking to align their supply chains with authentic sustainability principles in both developed and developing markets
Wittgenstein’s Language Games and Linguistic Relativity: The Bilingual Mind’s Perspective Shift
No full textThesis (B.A. in Humanistic studies, Minor in Psychology)--John Cabot University, Spring 2025.This paper examines the dynamic interplay between Ludwig Wittgenstein’s theory of language games and the bilingual experience. It argues that bilingualism provides a living demonstration of how language shapes thought, emotion, and identity. Taking from his formal Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Wittgenstein developed from his practical experience-based theory of language an approach for comprehending language as used in particular forms of life. Individuals who use multiple languages provide real-world examples of how bilingualism proves the cognitive theory. The research integrates perspectives from philosophy, cognitive science, and sociolinguistics. It uses empirical evidence to demonstrate that bilingual people develop better executive control as well as better cognitive flexibility and metalinguistic awareness. Bilinguals actively switch codes showing a special capability for understanding which linguistic system is operational. Research in neuroscience demonstrates how bilingualism affects brain structure most notably in areas responsible for paying attention and deciding and connects different languages to distinct emotional and embodied experiences. The research examines sociopolitical aspects about bilingualism through a lens which demonstrates that language functions as both an instrument for communication and a tool to gain power. Bilinguals experience linguistic marginalization in their lives, but this helps them to gain the benefits of cultural mixtures and intellectual advancement. The philosophical concepts are brought together with scientific survey results. The investigation challenges typical definitions of language as well as its meanings. For this approach, bilingualism is found to be more than technical proficiency since it is an intricate embodiment within context that captures and enhances Wittgenstein’s view of language as practice of life. This interdisciplinary inquiry underscores the importance of linguistic diversity as both a cognitive asset and a philosophical imperative in an increasingly interconnected world
Fulvia: Power, Propaganda, and the Erasure of Women in the Late Roman Republic
No full textThesis (B.A. in Classical Studies)--John Cabot University, Spring 2025.Fulvia was a prominent elite woman of the late Roman Republic who transcended the limitations of her time and gender to rise to power through marriages to three tribunes of the plebs: Publius Clodius Pulcher, Gaius Scribonius Curio, and Mark Antony (83 BC – 30 BC), the legendary Roman general who played a leading role in the political struggles and civil wars that transformed Ancient Rome from a Republic into the imperial Roman Empire. As the old Roman Republic crumbled and the autocratic Empire began to take shape, Fulvia emerged as a formidable figure, becoming one of the most audacious, strategically influential, and rhetorically targeted women of her time. As her first biographer, Celia Schultz, puts it, “She was more daring and more visible than any of her contemporaries except Cleopatra.” Her actions, often shocking to her contemporaries, defied convention and challenged traditional norms of Roman womanhood
Meltdown: Sacred silver lost by the church of S. Agostino in the 1527 Sack of Rome
No full textMaster of Arts in Art History -- John Cabot University, Spring 2025.An entire category of Central Italian art was all but eliminated in the 1527 Sack of Rome, as finely wrought silver and gold liturgical vessels, crosses, candlesticks and other sacred objects fell victim to looting by the army of Emperor Charles V. As his militia was no match for the invaders, Pope Clement VII reluctantly signed a humiliating capitulation agreement just four weeks after the initial attack. The agreement stipulated that the Pope, his cardinals, and other members of his retinue would remain imprisoned in Castel Sant’Angelo until a ransom of 400,000 ducats was paid. If Clement failed to meet the rapid payment schedule, imperial troops would remain in Rome, torturing and extorting her citizens, looting and re-looting palaces and churches. These were the urgent conditions under which the so-called siege coins of Clement VII were produced. Now extremely rare, these silver ducats were coined by melting down Papal treasure inside Castel Sant’Angelo, as one part of a desperate, multi-pronged effort to raise the necessary funds. To learn how one church outside the Vatican complex experienced the terrifying events of 1527, this study examines the archives of the church and convent of S. Agostino in Campo Marzio for the years just before and after the Sack. Sacristy inventories, account books, and an unusual “incident report” written into the 1524 inventory all shed light on an extraordinary moment in S. Agostino’s history. Careful reading and comparison of these documents reveals a story of death and destruction, money and property, personalities and relationships. In the end, the Augustinians obeyed the Pope’s order, and their sacred silver went into the crucible only to emerge as crudely formed coins. Today, just a few scattered exemplars of the siege ducats of Clement VII are known to exist – the last physical residue of the fine Renaissance works of art that were sacrificed to produce them
Semantic Diversification in Equity Portfolios
No full textIn the race to harvest the power of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in virtually every field, researchers and practitioners are faced with an ever increasing supply of novel tools that have not undergone domain-specific tests. This paper informs the methodological choices of researchers in economics and finance by comparing the performance of three Natural Language Processing (NLP) methods at an important task, namely using text analysis for portfolio diversification. Portfolio management can benefit from analysing text data in the form of company descriptions, since the returns of companies with similar descriptions tend to be correlated and consequently, portfolios of dissimilar companies should have lower risk. In this paper, three NLP methods are used to construct so-called minimum semantic concentration portfolios, which are designed to leverage the semantic diversity of the business descriptions of constituent companies to reduce portfolio volatility. Two widely used large language models (BERT and GPT) and an alternative AI solution inspired by neuroscience, called semantic fingerprinting are put to the test of comparing meaningfully the business descriptions of the S&P 500 and respectively Europe 600 constituents in order to derive actionable investment insights. The results show that all three NLP methods are able to extract relevant information from company descriptions: the minimum semantic concentration portfolios have significantly lower volatility than portfolios constructed with randomly chosen weights. While no NLP method is able to claim absolute superiority over its peers, semantic fingerprinting appears the most consistent and robust performer, since BERT and GPT demonstrate not only their potential but also a caveat, as their performances are volatile even across very similar tasks
Saints and Sitters: The Curious Case of Crypto-Portraiture
No full textMaster of Arts in Art History -- John Cabot University, Spring 2025.The Brescian Renaissance artist Giovanni Girolamo Savoldo is particularly noted for his portraits of individuals in the guise of saints. “Crypto-portraits” such as these remain an understudied topic in art-historical literature. To better understand the meaning and function of these images, this thesis engages in an in-depth exploration of the iconography present in Savoldo’s Portrait of a Woman in the Guise of Saint Margaret (ca. 1525, Pinacoteca Capitolina, Rome) in an attempt to discover the impetus behind the creation of such an image. The consensus in the scholarly literature is that the woman — whose identity remains unknown — is likely portrayed in the guise of her name saint. The “saintly disguise” would therefore be a result of onomastic motivations. This thesis, without denying that possibility, offers a re-interpretation of Savoldo’s canvas that takes into consideration the rich visual, literary, and devotional traditions associated with Saint Margaret and argues that the painting constitutes an act of sincere devotion towards the saint. Particularly when evaluated in combination with another painting by Savoldo, the Hampton Court Adoration, which depicts a female donor with a strong physiognomic resemblance to the Woman in the Guise of Saint Margaret, the motifs of childbirth and fertility become especially prominent. As such, this thesis argues that the two paintings were likely commissioned as a pair (or one shortly after the other) and that they shared a similar purpose as votive paintings or ex-votos invoking Saint Margaret in her role as the patroness of childbirth and aid to women in matters of fertility. The results of this thesis suggest that a knowledge of the saint’s iconography, hagiography, cultic history, and cultural importance may therefore be essential to understanding the function and meaning of portraits of individuals in the guise of saints. In contrast to most studies of Savoldo’s paintings, which remain heavily ensconced in stylistic analysis, this thesis also offers a profound engagement with the content of the artist’s painting and attempts to situate the work within its socio-cultural context
Revisiting the Pollock Myth: The Canon of American Modernism and the Museum of Modern Art's 1957 Retrospective
No full textThesis (B.A. in Art History)--John Cabot University, Spring 2025.This thesis examines the critical role of the 1957 Museum of Modern Art retrospective of Jackson Pollock, organized by Associate Curator Sam Hunter. It focuses on the ways in which this retrospective solidified the position of Pollock within the canon of American Modernism. The exhibition included thirty-five oil paintings, and a few watercolors and drawings shown publicly for the first time, ranging from the period 1938 to 1956 but concentrating on the last decade of Pollock's career. Autumn Rhythm (Number 30) was, here, celebrated as the premier example of Abstract Expressionism. Building on the curatorial strategies utilized at the retrospective, this research investigates how the exhibition framed Pollock's work, especially Autumn Rhythm (Number 30), to solidify his status as a leading figure in Abstract Expressionism, to the point of becoming synonymous with the heterogenous movement as a whole. Moreover, it goes into the 1998–99 MoMA retrospective, curated by Kirk Varnedoe and Pepe Karmel, which provided an opportunity to reassess Pollock’s work with new analytical and technical approaches, while still reinforcing the museum’s original narrative. While much of the copious scholarship on the artist focuses on his psychological struggles, this thesis instead investigates the institutional role that MoMA played in creating the "Pollock myth." It argues that, through deliberate curatorial decisions, MoMA contributed to a larger American Modernism narrative, still relevant today, by making his work iconic. This thesis is heavily reliant on primary sources, which include press releases and interviews as well as contemporary art criticism, especially by Harold Rosenberg and Clement Greenberg. Their early writings about the movement framed initial interpretations of Pollock's work. Harold Rosenborg saw Jackson Pollock's work as existential action, emphasizing the process of painting as a dramatic, psychological event. reflecting freedom and personal struggle. Clement Greenberg, however, praised Pollock's formal iii innovations as the culmination of modernist abstraction where form and process become content. Later perspectives provided by Rosalind Krauss. Meyer Shapiro, Kirk Varnedoe and Francis Frascina, most notably, question the artist's place within the movement and his role in American High Modernism. Ultimately, through careful analysis of these sources, this thesis aims to bring a fresh perspective on this particular exhibition and its foundational role in establishing the Pollock myth. By critically examining how MoMA's 1957 retrospective on Jackson Pollock helped reposition New York as the center of modern art, it challenges traditional Cold War narratives that identified the New York School, and Pollock in particular. as proof of American freedom and individualism
Urban Transformation Through Elite Benefaction of Late Republican to Early Imperial Ostia
No full textThesis (B.A. in Classical Studies)--John Cabot University, Spring 2025.Although Ostia’s development of new public buildings and spaces, as well as the permanence of old Republican sites under the Augustan period is sometimes overlooked in place of Trajanic or Hadrianic transformations, the Augustan age in the political transition between the Roman Republic and the Principate left a clear mark on the urban landscape through acts of local and metropolitan benefaction. This transformational period of Ostia, between the Late Republic and the Early Empire will be viewed through the study of four monuments, or spaces, connected to the city’s local benefactors, their metropolitan counterparts, but which could also be connected in some manner to the city’s civic identity. Although there does not seem to be a masterplan which was developed in Rome and imposed on Ostia to direct its transformations, there seems to be a clear metropolitan interest in the city, which results in several works of metropolitan benefaction made in Ostia. Ostian local elites seem to have responded to this shift by collaborating with and participating in some of the new spaces by furnishing the city with woks of their own
Restoring Jesuit Identity through Martyrial Militancy in 1930s Rome: Early- Christian, Late- Antique, and Medieval Revivals in Father Ledóchowski SJ’s Borgia Oratorium Publicum
No full textMaster of Arts in Art History -- John Cabot University, Spring 2025.In the early decades of the twentieth century, the Society of Jesus rearticulated its artistic identity in Rome through a visual language rooted in Early-Christian and medieval traditions, deliberately challenging the Late Renaissance and Baroque aesthetics historically associated with the Order. In pursuit of professing a renewed vision of Jesuit identity and proposing an alternative model of sacred experience—one distinct from the emotive and theatrical environments of traditional Jesuit Roman churches—the Oratorio Borgia, never before studied, originally functioned as a public devotional space enclosed within the Curia Generalizia della Compagnia di Gesù, in immediate proximity to Saint Peter’s Basilica. This is confirmed by the previously unexamined documentation preserved in the Archivum Romanum Societatis Iesu, and further substantiated by the ecclectic iconographic program devised for the oratory’s decoration—a scheme fundamentally oriented towards the faithful—that articulates a theological procession culminating in Salvation through the Most Holy Sacrament of the Eucharist. Within this eschatological visual construct, whose telos is the believer’s union with Christ, participating in the endurance of His redemptive sacrifice is rendered imperative, as it is through this expiatory act that humanity was reconciled to God. In much the same way that the early Jesuits, in the aftermath of the Society’s foundation and the establishment of their first missions, turned to the paradigms of martyrdom in Early- Christianity—as they themselves excavated and venerated the Roman catacombs—as models for apostolic fervor, perseverance in times of persecution, and the sanctifying values of sacrifice, so too did Father General Ledóchowski SJ, head of the Society of Jesus and commissioner of the oratory, appropriate this historical and spiritual framework in response to what he perceived as the threads confronting Catholic faith and tradition in modernity, including atheism, secularism, relativism, or communism. v It is through the act of opening the oratory beyond the Jesuit community within the Curia Generalizia that the Government of the Society of Jesus was able to visibly assert an active spiritual and intellectual militancy of the Papacy by therefore reiterating their role in a renewed Counter-Reformation, still intrinsic to the Jesuit identity even after the Restoration of the Order in 1814. To sanctify the world, and to shield the Church from its decay, addressing devotional Modern currents as remedies for Modern struggles—such as the cult of the Sacred Heart of Jesus—the decoration of the Borgia Oratory drew consciously from Early-Christian and Byzantine revival. Its historical, and spiritual strategy, materialised by two Jesuit brothers, enacted a revivalist theology of sacred art as militant sanctification