Journal articles on the topic 'Portrait painting Philosophy'

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1

Zhang, Michael W. "Boethian Philosophy in Sir Thomas More’s Familial Portrait." Moreana 53 (Number 205-, no. 3-4 (December 2016): 45–72. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/more.2016.53.3-4.5.

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The works of Boethius had a profound influence on Thomas More, both in his personal life and in his writings. The lives and circumstances of the two politicians/philosophers shared many similarities as well — the two men were trusted advisors to their kings, and both were eventually sentenced to death by the man whom they had served. Beyond coincidences, this connection is rendered visible following an analysis of the familial portrait of Thomas More and his family, originally painted by Hans Holbein, and locating the various Boethian themes that can be found within the work. David R. Smith has called this image a “counter-portrait” as the painting offers a set of intellectual parodies that are produced by contradicting certain pre-conceived expectations. My work will make a more specific claim that this familial portrait of the More household is not only immersed in Boethian themes, but this “counter-portrait” presents a series of active visual contradictions that run counter to Boethian reasoning, creating parodies in the process.
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2

Sijia, Liu. "The Scholar’s study in Painting and the History of Collection in Dutch XVII century." Scientific and analytical journal Burganov House. The space of culture 17, no. 1 (March 10, 2021): 83–94. http://dx.doi.org/10.36340/2071-6818-2021-17-1-83-94.

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his article is devoted to analysis the theme of the “scholar’s study” in Netherland XVII century painting. The reason for the rise of this theme is closely related to the great development of science and navigation in the XVII century in Netherland. Under the economic development, the tradition of collecting prevails among scholars. People admire knowledge and work on scientific inquiry. The author analyzes Gerrit Dou’s self-portrait The Artist’s studio and the symbolic meanings of objects in the painting. The author states that his self-portrait portrays himself as a scholar, reflecting the social ethos of worshiping knowledge. The specificity of his work, the themes of the scholar’s study, the influence of science, religion, philosophy on the painting of Gerrit Dou, the symbolic meanings of objects surrounding the scientist are considered. Jan van der Hayden’s paintings Still Life with a Globe, Books, Sculpture and Other Objects reflect the wide-ranging style of the collection at that time, reflecting both the worship of religion and the abundance of Netherland foreign products under the background of the great geographical discovery in the XVII century. During this period, establishment of Netherland universities and advent of the maritime age encouraged a thriving cartography producing. A large number of globes and scientific tools appeared in the paintings. They not only have religious meaning, but also show the progress of the new era. Audience can get a glimpse of the characteristics of a typical Netherland scholar’s collection from his paintings. The purpose of this article is to analyze the scientific progress, social development of the Netherlands. This allows you to take a fresh look at the assessment of creativity on the theme of the scholar’s study. To fulfill that purpose, need to complete following tasks: to characterize the specifics of paintings in the themes of the scholar’s study, to reveal the symbolism in the paintings The Artist’s studio by Gerrit Dou, Still Life with a Globe, Books, Sculpture and Other Objects and A Corner of a Room with Curiosities by Jan van der Hayden, to show the close connection between the development of science in the 17th century and the topic of the scientist’s office. The author concludes that the theme of the “scholar’s study” in Netherland XVII century paintings reflect the collection characteristics and aesthetics in the XVII century.
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HIGTON, HESTER. "Portrait of an instrument-maker: Wenceslaus Hollar's engraving of Elias Allen." British Journal for the History of Science 37, no. 2 (May 24, 2004): 147–66. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0007087404005412.

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Among the many engravings of landscapes, buildings, portraits and other illustrations produced by the seventeenth-century artist Wenceslaus Hollar, there are a small number of images of contemporary men of science. Of particular interest is the portrait of the instrument-maker Elias Allen, both because portraits of men of his social status were extremely uncommon at this time, and also because the cluttered mass of instruments shown in the image presents a picture wholly unlike other portraits of the period. The first part of this paper explores the position of portraiture as inherently linked to nobility, and seeks to present an explanation as to why the original oil painting of Allen (made by Hendrik van der Borcht and no longer extant) might have been made. The second part looks at the image itself, and discusses possible reasons for Hollar's production of the engraving some twenty years after the original.
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Chung, Kyungsook. "A Study on the Handwritings and Seals of Portraits and Flower-Bird-Animal Paintings of Chae Yongshin(1850-1941)." Korean Society of Culture and Convergence 44, no. 9 (September 30, 2022): 953–67. http://dx.doi.org/10.33645/cnc.2022.9.44.9.953.

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This paper aims to set the criteria on Portrait and Flower-bird-animal paintings of Chae Yongshin(1850-1941). To establish the purpose, 33 pieces of Portrait paintings and 12 pieces of Flower-bird-animal paintings were selected and analyzed in terms of the handwritings of articles and seals. There was no significant similarity between the handwritings of selected works and Chae Yongshin’ letter. The results showed that there must be others who wrote the articles on the works instead of Chae Yongshin. Even though this study didn’t get a satisfying result, it put meaning to consider and collect the handwriting and seals as database for future usage. A follow-up research on the painting style in Flower-bird-animal paintings of Chae Yongshin will be proceeded soon.
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Geimer, Peter. "Picturing the Black Box: On Blanks in Nineteenth Century Paintings and Photographs." Science in Context 17, no. 4 (December 2004): 467–501. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0269889704000237.

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ArgumentIn 1867 Edouard Manet painted the execution of the Mexican emperor Maximilian of Habsburg. Manet broke with the classical tradition of history painting, for he depicted the actual shooting itself instead of choosing moments before or after the execution. Thus, the painting refers to a moment that in real time would have been far too brief to be perceptible. Manet presented a portrait of living actors whose execution has already taken place. This depiction of the imperceptible invites comparison to contemporaneous photographs of extremely short periods of time: attempts to capture flying cannon balls (Thomas Kaife), to take flashlight portraits of patients that would undermine their bodies' reaction time (Albert Londe), to visualize the successive stages of a drop falling into water (Arthur Worthington). Like Manet these scientists referred to an “optical unconscious” (Walter Benjamin). A closer look at their work reveals that they dealt with a space of knowledge that went beyond the classical dichotomy between objectivity and imagination, scientific and artistic pictures.
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6

Escoubas, Eliane. "Derrida and the Truth of Drawing: Another Copernican Revolution?" Research in Phenomenology 36, no. 1 (2006): 201–14. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/156916406779165827.

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AbstractI begin with the hypothesis that Jacques Derrida's Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins is in a way the illustration of Speech and Phenomena and therefore Derrida's critique of phenomenology, intuition, perception, and seeing. I also want to show in this regard parallels with both Husserl and Kant. I emphasize that what is at issue in Memoirs of the Blind is art, visual arts; and in the great thematic richness of this text, I note the high points as well as the low points concerning the arts of the "visible." The fundamental question is: Does Derrida "see" the drawing, the painting, and indeed listen to the music?
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7

Engel, Emily. "Artistic Invention as Tradition in the Portrait Painting of Late-Colonial Lima." Anales del Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas 1, no. 113 (October 2, 2018): 41–79. http://dx.doi.org/10.22201/iie.18703062e.2018.113.2655.

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José Joaquín Bermejo, Cristóbal de Aguilar, Cristóbal de Lozano y Pedro Díaz no son nombres muy conocidos fuera del Perú. Sin embargo, estos artistas son algunos de los pintores más influyentes en la historia del arte del mundo del siglo XVIII. Como los pintores de retratos de primera clase en la capital mundial de Lima, estos artistas hacen visibles las identidades de los agentes del poder que ayudaron a dar forma al imperio iberoamericano en su crepúsculo. Colectivamente, José Joaquín Bermejo, Cristóbal de Aguilar, Cristóbal de Lozano y Pedro Díaz no son nombres muy conocidos fuera del Perú. Sin embargo, estos artistas son algunos de los pintores más influyentes en la historia del arte del mundo del siglo XVIII. Como los pintores de retratos de primera clase en la capital mundial de Lima, estos artistas hacen visibles las identidades de los agentes del poder que ayudaron a dar forma al imperio iberoamericano en su crepúsculo. Colectivamente, Bermejo, Aguilar, Lozano, Díaz facilitaron un cambio pictórico dentro de un género tradicional que requiere arcaísmo y la repetición para mantener su relevancia cultural. Sus retratos terminados demuestran visualmente una disonancia emergente entre la innovación artística y la tradición pictórica. A través de un examen de sus corpus de trabajo de finales del siglo XVIII, este artículo demuestra cómo los artistas ajustan la representación de los cuerpos de élite en el retrato para reflejar la sutil desintegración de un cuerpo social colonizado unificado.
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Gaynutdinov, Timur Rashidovich. "Blinding and origins of a painting." Философия и культура, no. 7 (July 2020): 1–9. http://dx.doi.org/10.7256/2454-0757.2020.7.33570.

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The subject of this research is the problem of a painting in Jacques Derrida’s philosophy, namely the so-called “hypothesis of blinding” advanced in his work “Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins”: “a painting… and the process of painting must be slightly related to blinding”. Derrida examines this established ontotheological tradition of classical metaphysics: blinding here becomes an essential sacrificial act, a condition that enables transition from physical eye to spiritual. Therefore, Derrida describes it as “sacrificial” economy, inevitably followed by the artist. Each work of the artist is prophecy of a blind person and designates horizons of the future. Explicating the aforementioned hypothesis of J. Derrida, the author refers to not only the text of “Memoirs of the Blind” and the accompanying documental narrative but also attempts to reconstruct the eponymous exhibition held the Louvre Palace in 1990, coordinated by Derrida. Comparison of these three layers provided better understanding “hypothesis of blinding”, and allowed inscribing to a more general philosophical context of deconstruction, as well as reconsidering the problems of figurative, mimetic and representative nature of a painting. The author comes ti the conclusion that essence of a painting is no way related with the visible, but its origin takes roots purely from memory.
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Ciobanu, Estella Antoaneta. "Food for Thought: Of Tables, Art and Women in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse." American, British and Canadian Studies 29, no. 1 (December 20, 2017): 147–68. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/abcsj-2017-0023.

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Abstract This article examines art as it is depicted ekphrastically or merely suggested in two scenes from Virginia Woolf’s novel To the Lighthouse, to critique its androcentric assumptions by appeal to art criticism, feminist theories of the gaze, and critique of the en-gendering of discursive practices in the West. The first scene concerns Mrs Ramsay’s artinformed appreciation of her daughter’s dish of fruit for the dinner party. I interpret the fruit composition as akin to Dutch still life paintings; nevertheless, the scene’s aestheticisation of everyday life also betrays visual affinities with the female nude genre. Mrs Ramsay’s critical appraisal of ways of looking at the fruit - her own as an art connoisseur’s, and Augustus Carmichael’s as a voracious plunderer’s - receives a philosophical slant in the other scene I examine, Lily Briscoe’s nonfigurative painting of Mrs Ramsay. The portrait remediates artistically the reductive thrust of traditional philosophy as espoused by Mr Ramsay and, like the nature of reality in philosophical discourse, yields to a “scientific” explication to the uninformed viewer. Notwithstanding its feminist reversal of philosophy’s classic hierarchy (male knower over against female object), coterminous with Lily’s early playful grip on philosophy, the scene ultimately fails to offer a viable non-androcentric outlook on life.
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10

Yushkova, E. V. "Voskresenskaya, M. (2020). The sociocultural dimension of the Russian Silver Age. St. Petersburg: SPbGU. (In Russ.)." Voprosy literatury, no. 3 (September 13, 2022): 284–87. http://dx.doi.org/10.31425/0042-8795-2022-3-284-287.

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In her monograph, M. Voskresenskaya attempts to examine the Russian Silver Age as a historian and a scholar of culture. That perspective is made clear by the book’s title: it points to a sociocultural dimension, so, instead of analysing specific works created during the aforementioned period, she focuses on the society that provided the context for certain cultural and artistic processes. The author undertakes a sociocultural study of the environment in which works emerged that are so famous today, and devotes a whole chapter to the philosophy espoused by the cultural elite. Voskresenskaya also tackles the political agenda — starting with a characteristic of the search for ways to reform the world, she moves on to describe the choice made by the period’s artists, poets and writers to take part or refuse participation in the war and the revolution, and their perception of these two events. Employing the methods of cultural history studies, Voskresenskaya is painting a group portrait of the cultural icons of the Russian Silver Age.
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11

Trubnikоva, Liudmyla. "AN EVOLUTION OF MIMIC LOOK AT FINE ART." Research and methodological works of the National Academy of Visual Arts and Architecture, no. 28 (December 15, 2019): 161–69. http://dx.doi.org/10.33838/naoma.28.2019.161-169.

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This article explore and analyses conformity to natural laws of individual interpretations of human emotions on a masterpieces of European artists from Antic age to early Modernism, also in Ukrainian painting (for instance, creative works of Olexander Murashko), The following examples are setting peculairities of creative positions of every author which reflected unusual mimic grimaces of his heroues in pickturesque portraits (especially at works of Antonello da Messina, Ercole de Roberti, Leonardo da Vinci, Frans Hals, Rembrandt Hannenszoon van Rijn, Mihaly Munkacsy, Ilya Repin, Edward Munk, with him legendary “Scream”, which paradoxally and repeatedly reflected in horror movie-art about twenty years ago — in the trilogy by Wes Craven) and Old Greek sculptures (“Athena and Marsyas”, “Laokoon”). Also the author of this article analyzed different views of representatives of classical philosophy and aesthetics of Age of Renassainse (Karol van Mander, Giorgio Vasari), Baroque, Classicism (Charles Lebrun) and Age of Education (Denis Diderot as author of “Salones”, Johann Joachim Winckelman, Johann Caspar Lavater — in recollection of Nikolay Karamzin), also used classic and modem famous historicals of fine art (Egene Fromentin, Bernard Berenson, Georgiy Nedoshivin) and contemporary scientists, which a lot of researched this problems (Giovanni Chivardi, Fritz Lange) etc. Author used pointed mimetic observations of some Ukrainian (from “Portrait” by Nikolay Gogol to short-story by Yuriy Mulik-Lutsik and great novel by Natalka Snyadanko) and foreign writers (Denis Diderot as author of “Le Neveu de Rameau”, Dafna du Maurier, Nikolay Chukovskiy), memories of Ukrainian painters (Mikola Burachek). Some materials from the recent history of those states were introduced into scientific usage. Review of need for inclusion of approaches and methods related to the fields of art criticism studies (par example, psychology, history of movie-art, mythology, philosophy), and certain concepts. An attempt to understand the problem of mimetic expressiveness in fine art.
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12

Dumitrescu, Marius. "A Journey Inside the Perception of the Self-Image - from the 15th Century Italian Portrait to the Glamorized Image on the Facebook." Postmodern Openings 12, no. 3 (August 10, 2021): 34–59. http://dx.doi.org/10.18662/po/12.3/326.

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This article aims to present the philosophical perspective upon the birth of the idea of the individual and the consequences of the discovery of the self-image on the techniques of image reproduction from the Renaissance to the present day. The process of projecting the self-image into the public space acquires a special importance with the elaboration of the portrait technique in the Italian painting of the 15th century. Through Leonardo da Vinci's paintings, this technique of reproducing self-image reaches a certain perfection. Following the evolution of this kind of projections and reproductions of the self-image, it is found that there is an obvious tendency by which the individual tends to free himself from certain patterns, or rather canons, which a certain epoch imposes. This process manifested in the visual arts corresponds to a new philosophical perception of man opened by the works of Ficino and Pico della Mirandola. The assertion of a new type of dignity, correlated with the idea of the microcosm, of the Renaissance man will lead to an affirmation of his own personality and especially to an increase of the will to power reflected more and more in the works of art. With the resurgence of the Italian renaissance, artists and philosophers experienced a decline, but found a favorable space for their development at the court of Elizabeth I, Queen of England. The art of portraiture, but also the philosophy of renaissance survives and is even more flourishing at the court of this queen. But the most important moment of this renaissance is marked by Dutch art after its liberation from Spanish rule. From this moment on, the emancipation of the individual will occur on an unimaginable scale until then.
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Kindi, Vasso. "Collingwood’s Opposition to Biography." Journal of the Philosophy of History 6, no. 1 (2012): 44–59. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/187226312x625591.

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Abstract Biography is usually distinguished from history and, in comparison, looked down upon. R. G. Collingwood’s view of biography seems to fit this statement considering that he says it has only gossip-value and that “history it can never be”. His main concern is that biography exploits and arouses emotions which he excludes from the domain of history. In the paper I will try to show that one can salvage a more positive view of biography from within Collingwood’s work and claim that his explicit attacks against biography target specifically the sensationalist kind. First, I will show that Collingwood, in his later writings, allowed that, not only thought, but also relevant emotions can be the subject matter of history, which means that even if one takes biography to deal with emotions, it can still qualify as history. Second, I will argue, based mainly on Collingwood’s Principles of Art, that biography can be compared to portrait painting, in which case, it can be redeemed as a work of art and not just craft and, thus, have more than entertainment value. It can also be part of history, and more specifically part of the history of art which Collingwood endorses, if one takes the life of an individual, recounted by a biographer, to be an artistic creation, as Collingwood seems to suggest.
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Ступин, С. С. "Half-century-long afternoon. The creative worlds of Vera and Sergei Kondulukov: painting 1971–2021." Iskusstvo Evrazii [The Art of Eurasia], no. 2(25) (June 30, 2022): 14–25. http://dx.doi.org/10.46748/arteuras.2022.02.001.

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Статья посвящена творчеству современных российских живописцев, заслуженных художников РФ, профессоров живописи Тольяттинского государственного университета Сергея Никитовича и Веры Ивановны Кондулуковых. Анализ творчества художников проведен с применением формально-стилистического и компаративного методов, а также с обращением к психоаналитической традиции интерпретации искусства в аспекте дихотомии интровертивного и экстравертивного (классификация К.Г. Юнга) и эстетико-философской оппозиции аполлонического и дионисийского (классификация Ф. Ницше) типов творчества. Изучаются наиболее репрезентативные в жанровом и тематическом отношении произведения авторов, в первую очередь портретная и пейзажная живопись. Обсуждается проблема традиции и новаторства в творчестве Кондулуковых: автор приходит к выводу, что принадлежность к академической школе не ограничивает, но потенцирует творческую свободу мастеров, поскольку высокопрофессиональное владение академическими приемами позволяет художникам решать сложные и разнообразные пластические задачи. В контексте интерпретации «народности» отечественного искусства Иваном Крамским, Петром Оссовским и Иваном Лубенниковым творчество Кондулуковых трактуется исследователем как передача живой традиции новым поколениям художников современной России. Новизна публикации состоит как в применении названных исследовательских стратегий к художественному наследию Сергея и Веры Кондулуковых, так и в осмыслении собственных рефлексий художников над проблемами философии искусства и эстетики. В данной статье впервые публикуются материалы интервью, записанных автором с супругами Кондулуковыми в январе 2022 года в их мастерской в Тольятти. Публикация приурочена к 50-летию совместного творческого пути художников (1971–2021) при акцентировании своеобразия манеры и пластического мышления каждого из героев статьи. The article presents an analysis of the work of contemporary Russian painters, Honored Artists of the Russian Federation, professors of painting at Togliatti State University Sergey and Vera Kondulukov. The author uses formal-stylistic and comparative methods, as well as referring to the psychoanalytic tradition of interpreting art in terms of the dichotomy of introversive and extraversive (C. Jung's classification) and the aesthetic-philosophical opposition of Apollonian and Dionysian (F. Nietzsche's classification) types of creativity. The most representative works of the authors in terms of genre and themes are studied, primarily portrait and landscape painting. An important issue of research is the problem of tradition and innovation in the work of the Kondulukovs: the author concludes that belonging to an academic school does not limit, but potentiates the creative freedom of masters, since highly professional mastery of academic techniques allows artists to solve complex and diverse plastic tasks. In the context of Ivan Kramskoy's, Petr Ossovsky's and Ivan Lubennikov's interpretation of the "nationality" of Russian art, the researcher interprets the work of the Kondulukovs as the transmission of a living tradition to new generations of artists of contemporary Russia. The novelty of the publication lies both in the application of these research strategies to the artistic heritage of Sergei and Vera Kondulukov, and in the understanding of the artists' own reflections on the problems of philosophy of art and aesthetics. This article publishes for the first time materials from an interview recorded by the researcher with the Kondulukovs in January 2022 in their workshop in Tolyatti. The publication is dedicated to the 50th anniversary of the joint creative path of the artists (1971–2021) with emphasis on the originality of the manner and plastic thinking of each of the masters.
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Yiu, Yvonne. "The Mirror and Painting in Early Renaissance Texts." Early Science and Medicine 10, no. 2 (2005): 187–210. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/1573382054088114.

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AbstractIn Italy, notably Florence, the late fourteenth and the fifteenth centuries witnessed the proliferation of texts that discuss the relationship between the mirror and painting. In them, the mirror is closely associated with major innovations of the time such as naturalistic representation and linear perspective. On a technical level, the authors describe the mirror's function in the painting of self-portraits and recommend it be used to draw foreshortened objects more easily and to judge the quality of finished paintings. The technical aspects often lead over to theoretical considerations such as the limitations of perspective, the origins of painting, the analogy between the mirror image and the painted image, and the concept that the mind of the painter resembles a mirror. The fact that these texts do not mention the concave mirror projection method described by Hockney and Falco speaks strongly against its use in the early Renaissance.
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Bann, Stephen. "Reviews : Louis Marin, Portrait of the King, trans. Martha M. Houle, foreword by Tom Conley, London: Macmillan, 1988, £29.50, 290 pp. Wendy Steiner, Pictures of Romance: Form against Context in Painting and Literature, London: University of Chicago Press, 1988, £22.50, 218 pp." History of the Human Sciences 3, no. 2 (June 1990): 301–5. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/095269519000300215.

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Zabrodina, Elena Al'bertovna. "“Sacred Theology” of Nicholas of Cusa in the portraits and altar paintings of the artists of the Early Netherlandish painting." Человек и культура, no. 4 (April 2020): 21–32. http://dx.doi.org/10.25136/2409-8744.2020.4.33349.

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The subject of this research is the processes that unfolded in the spiritual sphere of the Netherlandish society of the XV century, which can be assessed by the treatises of the prominent philosopher and figure of the Catholic Church Nicholas of Cusa (1401-1464), as well as by the images, scenes, artistic techniques used by Netherlandish artists of that time such brothers van Eyck, Rogier van Weyden, Hans Memling, Petrus Christus, Hieronymus Bosch, Robert Kampin, and others. Main attention is given to the comparison of the views of Nicholas of Cusa, as well as the manner and ideological program that can be seen in the work of the XV century artists. The scientific novelty consists in demonstration of just how the views of Nicholas of Cusa correlate to the worldview of the people of the XV century – transitional period from the Medieval Era to the Modern Age. Perceptions of the Netherlanders of that time of the world and people’s place within it, of divine predestination and everyday life are reflected in the orders for a new type of altar compositions and portraits. The conducted analysis uses specific examples to reveal the theme of commonness of the worldview in the examined chronological period. Comparison of the paintings and thoughts of Nicholas of Cusa demonstrate the commonness of views that reflect the transformational era in the history of art.
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Fara, P. "The Royal Society's portrait of Joseph Banks." Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London 51, no. 2 (July 22, 1997): 199–210. http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rsnr.1997.0017.

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The year before he died, although disingenuously insisting that ‘I do not feel as if Vanity was a Prominent trée in my character’, Joseph Banks vituperatively rejected the ‘intended Brittle Compliment’ of a commemorative Sévres vase because he disapproved of its proposed illustrations. Just as Banks policed Enlightenment visions of the lands he had explored and the specimens he had collected, so too he carefully monitored the images of himself that became available for public consumption. Recognizing the propagandizing power of visual representations, during his long reign as President of the Royal Society from 1778–1820, he influenced how he was shown in his own portraits, and commissioned paintings celebrating his colleagues' achievements, such as Nathaniel Dance's picture showing James Cook advertising his improved Pacific chart.
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Bychkov, V. V. "The Symbolic Essence of Art in Friedrich Schlegel’s Romantic Aesthetics." Art & Culture Studies, no. 1 (2021): 266–87. http://dx.doi.org/10.51678/2226-0072-2021-1-266-287.

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According to Friedrich Schlegel, one of the leading theorists of German Romanticism, the “highest” art is always symbolic, and it would be more precise to name the discipline that deals with it “symbolics”, rather than “aesthetics”. According to Schlegel, the highest arts comprise painting, sculpture, music, and poetry as the “arts of the beautiful and the ideally significant”. Using the examples of painting and literary arts, he demonstrates the symbolic character of art in general. Schlegel thinks that masterpieces of old Italian and German painters exemplify symbolic art. Schlegel is against separating painting into genres. He thinks that portrait, landscape, or still nature are merely sketches in preparation for a large, multi-figure, historical painting — as a rule, with Christian content — which leads the spectator to divine spheres. At the same time, painting must perform its symbolic function by means purely pictorial. The best examples of poetry (this is how Schlegel styles all belles lettres) also have been symbolic, especially during its “Romantic period”, from the Middle Ages and up to the 1600s. Schlegel refers to its symbolic meaning by the term “allegory”. The Bible — as an artistic, symbolic book — became the foundation of the “Romantic” literature of the Middle Ages, which took two routes: “Christian-allegorical”, which transfers Christian symbolism on to the entire world and life, and properly speaking Romantic, which presents every phenomenon of life as leading up to symbolic beauty. Using the example of drama, Schlegel divides works of art into three categories: superficial, spiritual-profound, and eschatological. According to the German philosopher, contemporary art has lost its symbolic content and mostly remains at the superficial level.
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Cole, Georgina. "Painting for the blind: Nathaniel Hone’s portraits of Sir John Fielding." Intellectual History Review 27, no. 3 (June 26, 2017): 351–76. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17496977.2017.1333325.

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Seastrand, Anna Lise. "History, Myth, and Maṭam in Southeast Indian Portraits." Cracow Indological Studies 24, no. 1 (August 18, 2022): 159–84. http://dx.doi.org/10.12797/cis.24.2022.01.08.

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Portraiture emerged as a major interest in literature, sculpture, and painting in early modern southeastern India. While this may, on one hand, reflect an interest in historical documentation, it is also indicative of the wider significance of mimetic representation across the arts. Pursuing one avenue of implication, this essay elucidates the relationship between historical, mythic, and ideal representations of unique individuals through portraiture, focusing on the murals at the great temple of Citamparam.
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Pizzorusso, Ann C. "A portrait of central Italy's geology through Giotto's paintings and its possible cultural implications." Geoscience Communication 3, no. 2 (December 15, 2020): 427–42. http://dx.doi.org/10.5194/gc-3-427-2020.

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Abstract. Central Italy has some of the most complex geology in the world. In the midst of this inscrutable territory, two people emerged – St. Francis and Giotto – and they would ultimately change the history of ecology, religion and art by extolling the landscapes and geology of this region. From antiquity to the Middle Ages, humans had a conflicting relationship with nature, seeing it as representing either divine or satanic forces. On the vanguard of a change in perspective toward the natural world was St. Francis of Assisi (ca. 1181–1226) who is now, thanks to his pioneering work, a patron of ecology. He set forth the revolutionary philosophy that the Earth and all living creatures should be respected as creations of the Almighty. St. Francis' affinity for the environment influenced the artist Giotto (ca. 1270–1337), who revolutionized art history by including natural elements in his religious works. By taking sacred images away from heaven and placing them in an earthly landscape, he separated them definitively from their abstract, unapproachable representation in Byzantine art. Giotto's works are distinctive because they portray daily life as blessed, thus demonstrating that the difference between the sacred and profane is minimal. Disseminating the new ideas of St. Francis visually was very effective, as the general populace was illiterate. Seeing frescoes reflecting their everyday lives in landscapes that were familiar changed their way of thinking. The trees, plants, animals and rocky landscapes were suddenly perceived as gifts from the Creator to be used, enjoyed and respected. Furthermore, Giotto recognized that the variety of dramatic landscapes would provide spectacular visual interest in the works. By including the striking landforms of central Italy, and portraying them accurately, Giotto allows us the opportunity to identify the types of rock in his frescoes and possibly even the exact locations he depicted. In fact, it would be discoveries in the pink Scaglia Rossa limestone – depicted in Giotto's frescoes as pink buildings and used to construct the Basilica of St. Francis at Assisi – which would revolutionize the history of geology.
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Kusukawa, Sachiko. "The Early Royal Society and Visual Culture." Perspectives on Science 27, no. 3 (June 2019): 350–94. http://dx.doi.org/10.1162/posc_a_00311.

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Recent studies have fruitfully examined the intersection between early modern science and visual culture by elucidating the functions of images in shaping and disseminating scientific knowledge. Given its rich archival sources, it is possible to extend this line of research in the case of the Royal Society to an examination of attitudes towards images as artifacts—manufactured objects worth commissioning, collecting, and studying. Drawing on existing scholarship and material from the Royal Society Archives, I discuss Fellows’ interests in prints, drawings, varnishes, colorants, images made out of unusual materials, and methods of identifying the painter from a painting. Knowledge of production processes of images was important to members of the Royal Society, not only as connoisseurs and collectors, but also as those interested in a Baconian mastery of material processes, including a “history of trades.” Their antiquarian interests led to discussion of painters’ styles, and they gradually developed a visual memorial to an institution through portraits and other visual records.
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Khalifa-Gueta, Sharon. "Leonardo’s Dragons—The “Rider Fighting a Dragon” Sketch as an Allegory of Leonardo’s Concept of Knowledge." Explorations in Renaissance Culture 44, no. 1 (March 28, 2018): 104–39. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/23526963-04401005.

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It has long been known that Leonardo da Vinci’s sketches showing a rider in combat with a dragon do not portray St. George. Viewing these sketches in connection with several of Leonardo’s writings, this essay suggests that they are allegories that should be interpreted on several levels. On the basic level, these combat scenes represent the battle of contraries, based on the symbolism common to Leonardo’s period where a combat between an equestrian and a dragon represented the clash of light versus darkness, life versus death, good versus evil, etc. However, I argue that they also comment on the scientific and philosophical issues that occupied Leonardo, including action versus reaction and the true concept of knowledge as opposed to falsehood and sophistry. This essay interprets these sketches as offering an insight into Leonardo’s analogical approach, which connects common symbolism to his personal perspective on science and philosophy, and thus points to a new way of looking at Leonardo’s drawings and paintings and decodes new aspects of Leonardo’s personal symbolism.
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Percival, Melissa. "Portraits of the Artist as a Young Woman: Painting and the Novel in France and Britain, 1800–1860 by Alexandra K. Wettlaufer." South Central Review 30, no. 2 (2013): 164–66. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/scr.2013.0015.

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Abdelrahman, Rania. "Envisioning ‘Freedom’: Liberated Gender Identities in Young Egyptian Women Artists’ Oral and Visual Narratives." Studi Magrebini 18, no. 2 (November 5, 2020): 135–63. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/2590034x-12340026.

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Abstract The 25 January revolution was a collective, popular movement that demanded improvement of life conditions on more than one level, such as social justice and better economic conditions, along with the call for freedom. Nevertheless, with the end of the demonstrations and the dispersal of the protestors, the spirit of the revolution and its demands continued to manifest on the level of the individual. The individualistic expressions of the demands were articulated by many individuals, each stressing one of the demands over the others. I argue that the freedom which inspired the 25 January revolution continues to inspire the aesthetic works of some contemporary Egyptian women painters. How is the ‘freedom’ which was one of the main mottos of the 25 January revolution reflected in these artists’ life stories and artworks? As independent artists, how do they negotiate their relationship with the different powers that control the art scene in Egypt? Their philosophy underlines their preoccupation with the liberation of identity, thus, the women they portray in their artworks enjoy a freedom similar to the one they aspire to. Their paintings reflect this preoccupation with women’s freedom – apparent in their clear commitment to women’s contemporary concerns, dilemmas and struggles against rigid societal norms and traditional gender roles/relations. The questions of subjectivity, memory, language and experience which are integral to oral history interpretation, and, according to Passerini, foreground ‘the peculiar specificity of oral material’ are looked at in relation to the artists’ artworks and oral histories.
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Roth, Ulrike. "AN(OTHER) EPITAPH FOR TRIMALCHIO: SAT. 30.2." Classical Quarterly 64, no. 1 (April 16, 2014): 422–25. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0009838813000888.

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Trimalchio's fabulous epitaph, recited in full by Petronius’ colourful host towards the end of the Cena (Sat. 71.12), has long attracted abundant comment. Similarly, allusions to the underworld in much of the decoration leading to and in Trimalchio's dining room have been the object of intense scholarly discussion of the freedman's morbid characterization. In consequence, it is now accepted that epitaph and funereal allusions make for a deliberate mirage of the netherworld – so much so that ‘… Trimalchio's home is in some sense to be regarded as a house of the dead’. As John Bodel has shown, ‘Petronius signalled his intention to portray Trimalchio's home as an underworld earlier in the episode’. Examples for this include the procession from the baths to Trimalchio's house that preceded the banquet (Sat. 28.4–5) – ‘resembling nothing so much as a Roman cortege’, and the wall paintings in the porticus of Trimalchio's house which made Encolpius stop and pause, as Aeneas had done at the Temple of Apollo at Cumae (Sat. 29.1). The example of the pairing of the Cerberus-like watchdog encountered by Encolpius and friends during their escape (Sat. 72.7) and the painted dog in Trimalchio's vestibule that frightened Encolpius upon his arrival (Sat. 29.1) makes it moreover clear that Petronius engaged in some elaborate ring composition concerning Trimalchio's portrayal as a dead man walking. It is surprising, then, that Petronius should have failed to square the circle as regards Trimalchio's epitaph: Sat. 71.12 appears to lack an earlier match – and this despite the fact that a visitor to a Roman tomb might well expect to be informed about the name of the deceased, and perhaps a few other details, at the moment of entering the tomb.
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Tyron, T. S., and D. Ajit. "Postmodernism and its emotional impact: The American T.V. Show, ‘Family Guy, as a Politically Incorrect Document." CARDIOMETRY, no. 23 (August 20, 2022): 226–35. http://dx.doi.org/10.18137/cardiometry.2022.23.226235.

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Postmodernism is a movement that grew out of modernism. Movements in art, literature, and cinema focused on a particular stance. The visual artists who created entertainment focused on expressing the creator herself/himself beginning from German expressionism to modernism, surrealism, cubism, etc. These art movements played an important part in what an artist (literature, art, and visual) portrayed to his or her audience. As perspectives played an important part, an understanding of what the artist needed to portray was critical. Modernism dealt with this portrayal, which came about due to the changes taking place in society. In terms of the industry, where the overall product dealt with features like individualism, experimentation and absurdity, modernism dealt with a need to overthrow past notions of what painting, literature, and the visual arts needed to be. “After World War II, the focus moved from Europe to the United States, and abstract expressionism (led by Jackson Pollock) continued the movement’s momentum, followed by movements such as geometric abstractions, minimalism, process art, pop art, and pop music.” Postmodernism helped do away with these shortcomings. An understanding of postmodernism is explored in this paper. The main point which sets it apart is concepts like pastiche, intersexuality, and spectacle. Concerning pop culture, an understanding of referencing is a constant trait used by postmodern art. Postmodern television and the central part of this study applied to the popular animated American TV show, ‘family guy’ is a postmodern show in its truest form, while attempting to use certain aspects of postmodernism tropes to help emphasize that visual art can be considered a historical document while doing an in-depth analysis of the visual text of ‘family guy by itself, several other research papers were used to help further put in stone that ‘family guy’ is a true representation of postmodern television. It is divided into two phases of data collection: context analysis, which involves a qualitative study. The second being in-depth interviews (also qualitative) which in itself helps give a subjective view of participants between the ages of 20 and 28. These comprise students who are familiar with the show and the concepts of the show. All of them, both frequent viewers of the show and those also politically informed of world politics, helped further emphasize the concept of the paper, which was the idea of how a television show in all its absurd narrative and pastiche functions as a historical document. The purpose of this study, along with the results for this research, is to help bring about the comprehension of how postmodern shows are influenced by other past events, figures of history, etc.; this understanding can explain how a television show like ‘family guy could be considered a historical document – by its narrative, by the cultural references connected to these said events, and also with the help of paintings, which the makers of the show use to design the episode of the show, and which reflect and refer to the actual historical figures. Historiography is being proven to be biased in more ways than one, which leads us to an understanding of a different narrative depending on one’s own opinions of history and historical documents as we know it.
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Hartkamp, Arthur, and Beatrijs Brenninkmeyer-De Rooij. "Oranje's erfgoed in het Mauritshuis." Oud Holland - Quarterly for Dutch Art History 102, no. 3 (1988): 181–232. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/187501788x00401.

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AbstractThe nucleus of the collection of paintings in the Mauritshuis around 130 pictures - came from the hereditary stadholder Prince William v. It is widely believed to have become, the property of the State at the beginning of the 19th century, but how this happened is still. unclear. A hand-written notebook on this subject, compiled in 1876 by - the director Jonkheer J. K. L. de Jonge is in the archives of the Mauritshuis Note 4). On this basis a clnsor systematic and chronological investigation has been carried out into the stadholder's. property rights in respect of his collectcons and the changes these underwent between 1795 and 1816. Royal decrees and other documents of the period 1814- 16 in particular giae a clearer picture of whal look place. 0n 18 January 1795 William V (Fig. 2) left the Netherlands and fled to England. On 22 January the Dutch Republic was occupied by French armies. Since France had declared war on the stadholder, the ownership of all his propergy in the Netherlands, passed to France, in accordance with the laws of war of the time. His famous art collections on the Builerth of in. The Hague were taken to Paris, but the remaining art objects, distributed over his various houses, remained in the Netherlands. On 16 May 1795 the French concluded a treaty with the Batavian Republic, recognizing it as an independent power. All the properties of William v in the Netehrlands but not those taken to France, were made over to the Republic (Note 14), which proceeded to sell objects from the collections, at least seven sales taking place until 1798 (Note 15). A plan was then evolved to bring the remaining treasures together in a museum in emulation of the French. On the initiative of J. A. Gogel, the Nationale Konst-Galerij', the first national museum in the .Netherlands, was estahlished in The Hague and opened to the public on ,31 May 1800. Nothing was ever sold from lhe former stadholder's library and in 1798 a Nationale Bibliotheek was founded as well. In 1796, quite soon after the French had carried off the Stadholder, possessions to Paris or made them over to the Batavian Republic, indemnification was already mentioned (Note 19). However, only in the Trealy of Amiens of 180 and a subaequent agreement, between France ararl Prussia of 1 802, in which the Prince of Orarage renounced his and his heirs' rights in the Netherlands, did Prussia provide a certain compensation in the form of l.artds in Weslphalia and Swabia (Note 24) - William v left the management of these areas to the hereditary prince , who had already been involved in the problems oncerning his father's former possessions. In 1804 the Balavian Republic offered a sum of five million guilders 10 plenipotentiaries of the prince as compensation for the sequestrated titles and goods, including furniture, paintings, books and rarities'. This was accepted (Notes 27, 28), but the agreement was never carried out as the Batavian Republic failed to ratify the payment. In the meantime the Nationale Bibliolkeek and the Nationale Konst-Galerij had begun to develop, albeit at first on a small scale. The advent of Louis Napoleon as King of Hollarad in 1806 brought great changes. He made a start on a structured art policy. In 1806 the library, now called `Royal', was moved to the Mauritshuis and in 1808 the collectiorts in The Hague were transferred to Amsterdam, where a Koninklijk Museum was founded, which was housed in the former town hall. This collection was subsequertly to remain in Amsterdam, forming the nucleus of the later Rijksmuseum. The library too was intended to be transferred to Amsterdam, but this never happened and it remained in the Mauritshuis until 1819. Both institutions underwent a great expansion in the period 1806-10, the library's holdings increasing from around 10,000 to over 45,000 books and objects, while the museum acquired a number of paintings, the most important being Rembrandt's Night Watch and Syndics, which were placed in the new museum by the City of Amsterdam in 1808 (Note 44). In 1810 the Netherlands was incorporated into France. In the art field there was now a complete standstill and in 1812 books and in particular prints (around 11,000 of them) were again taken from The Hague to Paris. In November 1813 the French dominion was ended and on 2 December the hereditary prince, William Frederick, was declared sovereign ruler. He was inaugurated as constitutional monarch on 30 March 1814. On January 3rd the provisional council of The Hague had already declared that the city was in (unlawful' possession of a library, a collection of paintings, prints and other objects of art and science and requested the king tot take them back. The war was over and what had been confiscated from William under the laws of war could now be given back, but this never happened. By Royal Decree of 14 January 1814 Mr. ( later Baron) A. J. C. Lampsins (Fig. I ) was commissioned to come to an understanding with the burgomaster of The Hague over this transfer, to bring out a report on the condition of the objects and to formulate a proposal on the measures to be taken (Note 48). On 17 January Lampsins submitted a memorandum on the taking over of the Library as the private property of His Royal Highness the Sovereign of the United Netherlartds'. Although Lampsins was granted the right to bear the title 'Interim Director of the Royal Library' by a Royal Decree of 9 February 1814, William I did not propose to pay The costs himself ; they were to be carried by the Home Office (Note 52). Thus he left the question of ownership undecided. On 18 April Lampsins brought out a detailed report on all the measures to be taken (Appendix IIa ) . His suggestion was that the objects, formerly belonging to the stadholder should be removed from the former royal museum, now the Rijksmuseum, in Amsterdam and to return the 'Library', as the collectiort of books, paintings and prints in The Hague was called, to the place where they had been in 1795. Once again the king's reaction was not very clear. Among other things, he said that he wanted to wait until it was known how extensive the restitution of objects from Paris would be and to consider in zvhich scholarly context the collections would best, fit (Note 54) . While the ownership of the former collections of Prince William I was thus left undecided, a ruling had already been enacted in respect of the immovable property. By the Constitution of 1814, which came into effect on 30 March, the king was granted a high income, partly to make up for the losses he had sulfered. A Royal Decree of 22 January 1815 does, however, imply that William had renounced the right to his, father's collections, for he let it be known that he had not only accepted the situation that had developed in the Netherlands since 1795, but also wished it to be continued (Note 62). The restitution of the collections carried off to France could only be considered in its entirety after the defeat of Napoleon at the Battle of Waterloo on 18 June 1815- This was no simple matter, but in the end most, though not all, of the former possessions of William V were returned to the Netherlands. What was not or could not be recovered then (inc.uding 66 paintings, for example) is still in France today (Note 71)- On 20 November 1815 127 paintings, including Paulus Potter's Young Bull (Fig. 15), made a ceremonial entry into The Hague. But on 6 October, before anything had actually been returned, it had already been stipulated by Royal Decree that the control of the objects would hence forlh be in the hands of the State (Note 72). Thus William I no longer regarded his father's collections as the private property of the House of Orange, but he did retain the right to decide on the fulure destiny of the... painting.s and objects of art and science'. For the time being the paintings were replaced in the Gallery on the Buitenhof, from which they had been removed in 1795 (Note 73). In November 1815 the natural history collection was made the property of Leiden University (Note 74), becoming the basis for the Rijksmuseum voor Natuurlijke Historie, The print collection, part of the Royal Library in The Hague, was exchanged in May 1816 for the national collectiort of coins and medals, part of the Rijksmuseum. As of 1 Jufy 1816 directors were appointed for four different institutions in The Hague, the Koninklijke Bibliotheek (with the Koninklijk Penningkabinet ) , the Koninklijk Kabinet van Schilderijen and the Yoninklijk Kabinet van Zeldzaamheden (Note 80) . From that time these institutions led independenl lives. The king continued to lake a keen interest in them and not merely in respect of collecting Their accommodation in The Hague was already too cramped in 1816. By a Royal Decree of 18 May 1819 the Hotel Huguetan, the former palace of the. crown prince on Lange Voorhout, was earmarked for the Koninklijke Bibliotheek and the Koninklijk Penningkabinet (Note 87) . while at the king's behest the Mauritshuis, which had been rented up to then, was bought by the State on 27 March 1820 and on IO July allotted to the Koninklijk Kabinet van Schilderijen and the Koninklijk Kabinet van Zeldzaamheden (Note 88). Only the Koninklijk Kabinet van Schilderijen is still in the place assigned to it by William and the collection has meanwhile become so identified with its home that it is generally known as the Mauritshui.s'. William i's most important gift was made in July 1816,just after the foundation of the four royal institutions, when he had deposited most of the objects that his father had taken first to England and later to Oranienstein in the Koninklijk Kabinet van Zeldzaamheden. The rarities (Fig. 17), curios (Fig. 18) and paintings (Fig. 19), remained there (Note 84), while the other art objects were sorted and divided between the Koninklijke Bibliotheek (the manuscripts and books) and the koninklijk Penningkabinet (the cameos and gems) (Note 85). In 1819 and 182 the king also gave the Koninklijke Bibliotheek an important part of the Nassau Library from the castle at Dillenburg. Clearly he is one of the European monarchs who in the second half of the 18th and the 19th century made their collectiorts accessible to the public, and thus laid the foundatinns of many of today's museums. But William 1 also made purchases on behalf of the institutions he had created. For the Koninklijke Bibliotheek, for example, he had the 'Tweede Historiebijbel', made in Utrecht around 1430, bought in Louvain in 1829 for 1, 134 guilders (Pigs.30,3 I, Note 92). For the Koninkijk Penningkabinet he bought a collection of 62 gems and four cameos , for ,50,000 guilders in 1819. This had belonged to the philosopher Frans Hemsterhuis, the keeper of his father's cabinet of antiquities (Note 95) . The most spectacular acquisition. for the Penninukabinet., however, was a cameo carved in onyx, a late Roman work with the Triumph of Claudius, which the king bought in 1823 for 50,000 guilders, an enormous sum in those days. The Koninklijk Kabinet van Zeldzaamhedert also received princely gifts. In 1821- the so-called doll's house of Tzar Peter was bought out of the king's special funds for 2.800 guilders (Figs.33, 34, ,Note 97) , while even in 1838, when no more money was available for art, unnecessary expenditure on luxury' the Von Siebold ethnographical collection was bought at the king's behest for over 55,000 guilders (Note 98). The Koninklijk Kabinel van Schilderyen must have been close to the hearl of the king, who regarded it as an extension of the palace (Notes 99, 100) . The old master paintings he acquzred for it are among the most important in the collection (the modern pictures, not dealt with here, were transferred to the Paviljoen Welgelegen in Haarlem in 1838, Note 104). For instance, in 1820 he bought a portrait of Johan Maurice of Nassau (Fig.35)., while in 1822, against the advice of the then director, he bought Vermeer' s View of Delft for 2,900 guilders (Fig.36, Note 105) and in 1827 it was made known, from Brussels that His Majesty had recommended the purchase of Rogier van der Weyden's Lamentation (Fig.37) . The most spectacular example of the king's love for 'his' museum, however, is the purchase in 1828 of Rembrandt's Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp for 32,000 guilders. The director of the Rijksmuseum, C. Apostool, cortsidered this Rembrandt'sfinest painting and had already drawn attention to it in 1817, At the king'.s behest the picture, the purchase of which had been financed in part by the sale of a number of painlings from. the Rijksmuseum, was placed in the Koninklijk Kabinet van Schilderijen in The Hague. On his accession King William I had left the art objects which had become state propery after being ceded by the French to the Batavian Republic in 1795 as they were. He reclaimed the collections carried off to France as his own property, but it can be deduced from the Royal Decrees of 1815 and 1816 that it Was his wish that they should be made over to the State, including those paintings that form the nucleus of the collection in the Mauritshuis. In addition, in 1816 he handed over many art objects which his father had taken with him into exile. His son, William II, later accepted this, after having the matter investigated (Note 107 and Appendix IV). Thus William I'S munificence proves to have been much more extensive than has ever been realized.
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Gibson, Richard Hughes. "Signs of Friendship: A Response to Alexander Nehamas’s ‘The Good of Friendship’." Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, June 30, 2019. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/arisoc/aoz011.

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Abstract This piece responds to Alexander Nehamas’s claim in ‘The Good of Friendship’ (2010) that painting has difficulty representing friendship, an issue exemplified for Nehamas by Jacopo Pontormo’s double portrait Two Friends (c.1522). I argue that friendship has not been as elusive for the painter as Nehamas suggests, using as a counter-example Quentin Massys’s diptych of Erasmus and Pieter Gillis (1517). My exposition of Massys’s picture, moreover, reveals dimensions of modern friendship, particularly its concerns for communications media and publicity, neglected by Nehamas’s account.
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Mohr, Peter D. "Acta Anatomica: A portrait of an anatomy department, Christmas 1951." Journal of Medical Biography, April 4, 2022, 096777202210904. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/09677720221090455.

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Seventy years ago, two medical art students painted a group portrait of the staff of the anatomy department in the University of Manchester Medical School. The painting is an unusual allegorical portrayal of the staff as pantomime characters. This paper asks: who were they and what were their subsequent careers? Does this picture tell us anything about the role of anatomy in medical education in the 1950s?
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32

Stoddart, Olivia, and Gerry Alabone. "Thomas Sackville's Hall of Fame: displaced, reinvented and preserved at Knole." Notes and Records: the Royal Society Journal of the History of Science, February 23, 2022. http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rsnr.2021.0044.

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Between 1605 and 1608 Knole was transformed into a dazzling Renaissance palace by Thomas Sackville, 1st Earl of Dorset. All around its largest Gallery ran a frieze of nearly fifty oval portraits, of which thirty-eight survive on their original rectangular framed oak panels. In 1702 the paintings were prised from their walls and moved elsewhere in the house. The surviving panels had deteriorated, mostly owing to movement in their wood being restrained by their original engaged batten frames. Sources state that in 1793 the paintings restorer Francis Parsons was responsible for significant interventions that effectively changed the set from fragments of a fitted Jacobean decorative interior into a hang of individual paintings in a more contemporary neoclassical livery. Aesthetic changes made by Parsons reflect a change in taste during this era whilst simultaneously addressing the paintings' physical deterioration—principally interventions to the back of the panels in an attempt to keep the portraits flat. Additionally, the set was augmented with six portraits, possibly older than Sackville's original set. These treatments carried out during the eighteenth century to stabilize, restore, augment and update this important Jacobean portrait set demonstrate careful manipulation of their condition and significance.
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Lægring, Kasper. "The (Re)birth of Genre Painting during the Danish Golden Age The Case of the Studio ‘Portrait’." MDCCC 1800, no. 1 (October 24, 2022). http://dx.doi.org/10.30687/mdccc/2280-8841/2022/11/003.

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In standard twentieth-century accounts of the state of painting during the Danish Golden Age (1801-1864), genre painting is seldom credited with any share of the painterly innovativeness of the period. And although contemporary attempts at a scholarly revision have done much to remedy this situation, Danish Golden Age genre painting is usually not considered outside of its immediate historical context. In contrast, this article, which focuses on the genre of art students painting each other in their studios, argues that genre painting was a driving force in the Romantic turn in Danish painting. It concerns a series of interconnected paintings from the late 1820s, painted by Wilhelm Bendz, Ditlev Blunck and Albert Küchler, and it argues that these works not only stand in relation to past examples from the Dutch Golden Age, they also reinvent conventional concepts in the image of Romanticism. Furthermore, these canvases testify to an intense aesthetic exchange between theatre and painting, it is argued, which is substantiated with reference to the outputs by the poet and playwright Henrik Hertz and the philosopher F. C. Sibbern. Whilst this reciprocity constituted a rapprochement to realism, it by no means implies that the studio ‘portrait’ was just an outcome of an interest in the quotidian; in fact, it is argued that the term ‘reality effect’ might better explain the artistic ambition at work. Lastly, this article makes the case for an interpretation of the studio ‘portrait’ as being equally indebted to, and compositionally carefully balanced between, conventionality and experimentation.
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Liu, Peng. "Cultural Technique in Creative Practice: Exploring Cultural Embodiment in the Movement of the Body in a Studio Space." M/C Journal 18, no. 2 (April 29, 2015). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.959.

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Figure 1: Peng Liu, Body Techniques. Photograph. (2014).As an academic researcher as well as practicing artist, I am interested in my bodily movement/techniques in the actions of painting which inevitably reflects the institutions enacted upon my body as representation of Chinese culture/society, and also highlight my individual practice as an artist in response to the world. According to Shilling (10-12), Turner (197), Douglas (68-78) and Mauss (75), the body is historically inherited and culturally embodied. My bodily experience of wandering in the space of the Forbidden City is mediated by its historical and cultural formations, as Turner notes that human beings “are simultaneously part of nature and part of culture […] and culture shapes and mediates nature…nature constitutes a limit in human agency” (197). Specifically, my body is affected by the concept of grand unification which is reflected in its actions and reactions. It is interested in the Confucian conditions of the limits to what is possible in the techniques of painting and how the techniques of painting rely upon and resist the grand unification promised by Confucian thought. Every action, as Douglas notes, “always sustaining a particular set of cultural meanings, a particular social order” (68).The concept of grand unification is apparent in the space of the Forbidden City in that the design of every courtyard is in hierarchical relation to each other, not only physically connected and distinguished through hidden doorways, corridors, and verandas, but also the styles and plants suggesting their coherency within/to the city as the head of the hierarchical society. My body responds to the architectural space in certain ways whereby visual perception and tactile experience of touching surfaces of wooden columns, cornerstones, and fallen roof tiles consolidate the interactions of my body with the space under the concept, as my body is forming its techniques to approach corners and details.The Forbidden City represents a dynamic fusion or hybrid setting. It is an eastern historical and cultural precinct as much as a symbol of western economic and technological exchange. Because of its particularity as the continued power centre of the nation, the Forbidden City becomes a material form of memory, like a portal to access the past. As much as immaterial form, the Forbidden City generates viewers’ affective and intuitive responses allowing the viewers to imagine ancient time and space even though they are physically in present time and space.My everyday bodily actions, embodied with historical thought and culture means as being a “cultural men” (Merleau-Ponty 7), or a cultural meme, may obtain rich sensations and experience through multiple senses in the space of the Forbidden City; however the everyday body and its actions may inadequate in expressing the bodily experience in studio. While Merleau-Ponty describes the relationship between lived object and post-impressionist painter: “The lived object (in nature) is not rediscovered or constructed on the basis of the contributions of the (human) senses; rather, it presents itself to us from the start” (5), his words imply the actions of expression in painting may require different techniques from everyday life. And Frenhofer notes the role of hand as bodily technique in studio: “A hand is not simply part of the body (in everyday perspective), but the expression and continuation of a thought which must be captured and conveyed” (Frenhofer cited in Merleau-Ponty 7), and result in brushstrokes.Apart from being social and cultural, therefore, my everyday habitual actions are re-thought and expanded to form a new series of bodily techniques in studio in order to express my bodily experience in the space. Body techniques in studio are not only cultural embodied as representation of social contexts, but also artistic – being individual in response to the world.And paint (painting) is the documentation of my body movement/techniques in studio space, as James Elkins notes: “Paint is a cast made of the painter’s movements, a portrait of the painter’s body and thoughts […] (it) records the most delicate gesture and the most tense (tensest) […] (and) tells whether the painter sat or stood or crouched in front of the canvas” (5). Each brushstroke reflects particular bodily techniques formed in studio which is the combination of both cultural embodiment and artistic expression that would barely appeared in everyday life.As a practicing artist who was trained under the influence of the concept of the grand unification, I was taught to paint relationships on canvas as one of many ways to handle the medium. Every colours and brushstrokes, painted in terms of tones, perspectives, and size of brushstrokes build the relationships in between in order to construct a coherent system which balances positive and negative shapes. There is no such “right or wrong” colour/brushstrokes. There are only appropriate or inappropriate colour/brushstrokes. The dynamics of the painting is reshuffled with every colour/brushstrokes painted on canvas at a time. Painting is a process of constant balancing. As Bernard said, “each stroke must ‘contain the air, the light, the object, the composition, the character, the outline, and the style.’ Expressing what exists is an endless task” (Bernard cited in Maurice Merleau-Ponty 5). And the task of expressing on canvas is not the showcase of our visual ability in capture shapes and colours from nature or memories, but is to see how my next brushstroke interacts with the existing marks on canvas. The photos taken in the space, may help to recall memories at first place, would have little to do with the actions to painting in studio as soon as the first brushstroke is laid.The Concept of Grand Unification in Everyday Embodied Body Movement and My Body Techniques in Studio SpaceThe concept of grand unification is understood as Dao, which originated from Laozi founder of Daoism and has variable interpretations one of which appeared as communality in some English translations. The grand unification was advocated by major ancient philosophies such as: Confucianism, Daoism, Mohism, and in processes like Legalism, in China to reflect the philosophers’ understanding about the world. For example, Confucius points out: “天下有道,则礼乐征伐自天子出” (“if the nation is unified under one centre, the nation is in good shape”). This implication of the concept of grand unification in politics encouraged centralization, which is fulfilling god’s will according to Daoism.Liu Che, the Wu emperor in Han dynasty, adopted Dong Zhongshu’s suggestion in Interactions between Heaven and Mankind, to “罢黜百家,独尊儒术” (“venerate Confucianism, meanwhile, ban the rest of philosophies and ideologies inherited from the Warring state period”). This political move established Confucianism as the only official ideology in China, which applied the grand unification in cultural/ideological perspective.The idea of the grand unification is interpreted and embedded in daily life, forming a set of body techniques in relation to the hierarchical society, for example, the mid-autumn festival which is one of the two most important festivals in China. By using the astronomical phenomena of the full moon as both a symbol and a metaphor, moon in full, represent the nation in unification as well as a family reunion.In terms of Confucian values, every common person should reunite with their family to celebrate the festival by having a family feast. The feast not only gathers the family, but also suggests the nation which is seen as a big family that shall be unified too, for example many poems from the Tang and Song Dynasty are themed on the full moon to express their nostalgia as well as the wish of a unified nation. Such as poet Li Bai wrote in Tang dynasty: “举头望明月,低头思故乡” (“I raised my head and looked out on the mountain moon; I bowed my head and thought of my far-off home”). Moon cake is one of the festival foods made in the shape of full moon as a symbol of perfection in family reunion.Even for those people who do trading far away from home all year round, they must make their way back home in time for the family feast to celebrate and express their filial piety, which is one of essentials in Confucianism. The very first evidence of body technique occurs when the family members literally step across the doorsill back from business trip when they greet parents straight way in the principal room. A well educated person under the value of Confucianism would salute his parents with formal/full ketou in expressing filial piety. This form of address was considered “rituals of abject servitude” (181) by James L. Hevia. There were nine types of ketou which, as body techniques, were applied in everyday life and highlighted the hierarchical society orientated by the centralization.The actions of ketou involve everyone’s physical participation and cultural engagement with the idea of centralization so that the philosophical content of the idea behind the phenomenon is inscribed into common bodies. The everyday accumulated bodily memories and experience of participating in the idea drives the bodies to behave accordingly and technically and impacts upon the bodies to reinforce the ideology over and over again. The concept of grand unification is widely accepted and implemented in the nation as cultural reference, which discipline every body into a fixed role in the hierarchical society, as Michel Foucault describes culture “a hierarchical organization of values, accessible to everybody, (and) at the same time the occasion of a mechanism of selection and exclusion” (173). The senses of grand unification in the hierarchical society became a part of the national identity in centuries, not only as abstract concept but also as concrete culture embodiment in every action of everybody on daily base.With such cultural means inherited, my bodily movement in action to painting dedicatedly place and adjust every brushstroke in relation to the existing marks in order to construct a collective and systematic world. My brushstrokes, as James Elkins notes, are “the evidence of the artist’s manual devotion to his image” (3) which provide the balance between the sense of stability created by the composition and the sense of infinite possibilities created by the subtlety of the colour. (Figure 2) There is neither strong contrast in using colours, nor sharp edges painted, as the air I painted not only has softened every object, but also has integrated every object into the holistic atmosphere. The world is “a mass without gaps” (Merleau-Ponty 5) and the ultimate purpose of grand unification underneath its hierarchical structure is in ever pursuit of a virtuous circle – a mystical interpretation and expectation about the world in order in terms of Chinese ancient philosophy. The scene of painting “is not just one of my visual perceptions recalled from memory but a bodily experience as participant in the scene” (Liu 25) and my cultural embodiment which are expressed and translated through body techniques into the language of painting in studio. The constantly moving body perceives the colour of the space as infinite, and it seems as though the space itself vibrates. Figure 2: Peng Liu, The Forbidden City Study Series Two. Oil on canvas, 100cm x 170cm. Photo: Peng Liu (2010).While I physically explores and forms my very own techniques (as the language of painting), the intention on applying certain body techniques to ensure the painters’ understanding and to create an appropriate artwork is historical inherited. For example, in early tenth century, Jing Hao firstly theorized types of brushstrokes, called 笔法记 (The Theory of Brushstrokes in Chinese Landscape Painting), for depicting different objects accordingly. The theorized brushstrokes specify particular bodily movements for depicting certain objects, such as the fingers in variable ways of holding Chinese brushes and the pressure of hand’s strength put into each brushstroke. The theorized bodily movements/techniques would create sufficient communication and establish a hierarchical relation in between depicted objects, which translate the painter’s cultural understanding of the grand unification into the expression of Chinese landscape painting.Certainly, the sense of grand unification in Chinese landscape painting can be achieved in many methods and different techniques according to each individual artist. For instance, Guo Xi’s painting techniques, called “the angle of totality” or “floating perspective” which displaces the static eye of viewers by producing multiple perspectives in two-dimensional scroll painting, as his artistic interpretation of the sense of grand unification. (Figure 3) Guo, cited in R. M. Barnhart (372), describes the objects relation realized in his techniques: “山以水为血脉,以草木为毛发,以烟云为神采,故山得水而活 […] 水得山而媚” (“Mountain and water come alive through the mutual endorsement on each other. Water makes mountain vibrant; and mountain makes water vigorous”).Figure 3: Guo Xi. Early Spring. Hanging scroll, ink and colour on silk. 158.3 x 108.1. National Palace Museum, Taipei. (1072). And Guo's paper “Mountains and Waters”, cited in Grousset, notes: “The clouds and the vapours of real landscapes are not the same at the four seasons. In spring they are light and diffused, in summer rich and dense, in autumn scattered and thin, and in winter dark and solitary. When such effects can be seen in pictures, the clouds and vapours have an air of life” (195). Every lived object become full of vigour by the interaction with other lived object depicted together to create a sense of coherence as whole. The vibrant communications between depicted objects reinforce the aliveness of individuals within the atmosphere of the painting. The virtuous circle appears. Moreover, his painting express double meanings that not only eulogize the dynamic scene created by the relationship between every depicted object, but also imply the concept of grand unification that every object is supposed to play their own part, to be appropriate in the centralized atmosphere.Under the influence of the concept and with the awareness of body techniques in terms of Chinese painting, my body has brought its cultural habits into the studio while interrogate its own process of translation of the bodily experience into the language of painting through bodily movement. In particular, by depicting in paint the colour of the light, temperature, and atmosphere of spaces that are shaped by buildings, and how bodies interact with these affects, it is like unfolding communications on the canvas about what happens between my body and the space of the Forbidden City. My body, when making paintings, then, becomes a vehicle for expressing my remembered bodily responses to the resonances of the space. And through the compositional construction of the image, I am, or my body is able to find the best combination between colours, lines and forms to interpret those experiences/stories all under the unified voice. In the process of translating, from idea to object, the movement/techniques of my body help me to revive those bodily experiences from the space of the Forbidden City. During the constant movement of my arm and my hand, holding the brushes, I look for the best moment to leave a brushstroke on the canvas in the most appropriate angle. Every move of my body along with every colour left on the canvas is the representation of the ideology that my cultural embodied body from history creates the painting.The movement of my physical body in studio enacts my cultural body in the sense of provoking memories of the inscribed experience and embodied knowledge from the space of the Forbidden City to colonize the studio. The dynamics of the studio assimilate into the space of the Forbidden City, not through some display objects such as printed photos taken in the space, but through my body’s physical and cultural presence in actions to painting. Apart from interacting with brushstrokes, the bodily movement also involve the rest of the studio into actions, such as wall, lights, tables, palette, little things placed behind easels, and the air around my bodies which are inevitably caught in my sight as background while travelling between canvas and palette. The bodily actions in studio, as Merleau-Ponty notes, “is a process of expression […] to grasp the nature of what appears to us in a confused way and to place it (on canvas) before us as a recognizable object” (6). Such bodily movement and techniques housed within, which may be differentiated from everyday actions, are culturally embodied and individual artistic. Therefore, as result of it, the painting, as a technique, becomes a post-colonial, which indicates the embodied knowledge and experience colonized in, as a material form of memory at the same time as an immaterial form to generate viewers’ affective and intuitive responses by allowing the viewers to imagine.To continually consider the painting as the techniques of my bodily movement in studio, the rhythm of my painting (constructed by composition, colour, and brush marks) is connected with my variable perceptions sensed in the space, reflecting my bodily experience, and affecting my viewers through its pictorial depiction. My use of colour is subtle, vivid and individualized, as the original colours of the buildings merely serves as a reference point. (Figure 4) Specifically, the colours shown in my paintings display a collection of colours that my body perceives while moving in the space at a particular time; rather than the actual colour of the paint on the building itself perceived through a fixed geometric or photographic perspective. This is called “the lived perspective” (Cezanne cited in Merleau-Ponty 4), emphasising on expressing the colours perceived by my body constantly changing in subtle ways with every step my body taken in the space over a period of time. And “this visual rhythm is the translation of my bodily experience in the space, not only representing a still scene at a specific moment, but also visualizing a set of body movements/techniques accumulated in the space over a period of time” (Liu 25-26); as well as in studio.Figure 4: Peng Liu. The Forbidden City Study Series Three. Oil on canvas. 170cm x 300cm. Photo: Peng Liu (2013).ConclusionAcknowledging my body is historically inherited and culturally embodied as the result of participating in different societies and my bodily experience is perceived “through the mediation of cultural categories” (Douglas 68); “it is certain that a person’s life does not explain his (art) work” (Merleau-Ponty 8). My body techniques in dealing with everyday society are re-thought and expanded in studio space, which highlight my bodily movement not only representing my body as cultural embodied being, but also exposing my individual as an artist in response to the world.ReferencesBarnhart, R.M., et al. Three Thousand Years of Chinese Painting. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997.Confucius. The Analects of Confucius. Trans. P, Liu. No. 16. Written 770-476BC.Dong, Zhongshu. 天人策 [Interactions between Heaven and Mankind]. Written 179-104BC.Douglas, Mary. “The Two Bodies.” The Body: A Reader. Edited by Mariam Fraser and Monica Greco, New York: Routledge, 2005. 68-78.Elkins, James. What Painting Is. New York: Routledge, 1998. 3-5.Foucault, Michel. L'hermeneutique du sujet: Cours au Collège de France, 1981-1982. Paris: Gallimard Seuil, 2001.Grousset, Rene. The Rise and Splendour of the Chinese Empire. Barnes & Noble Inc, 1995.Guo, Xi. 林泉高致集 – 山水训 [Chinese Landscape]. 1020-1090AD.Hevia, James L. “Sovereignty and Subject: Constituting Relations of Power in Qing Guest Ritual.” Body, Subject & Power in China. Eds. Angela Zito and Tani E. Barlow. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994.Jing, Hao. 笔法记 [The Theory of Brushstrokes in Chinese Landscape Painting]. Written 923-936AD.Li, Bai. 静夜思 [On a Quiet Night]. Trans. S. Obata.Liu, Peng. “The Impact of Space upon the Body in the Forbidden City: From the Perspective of Art.” Body Tensions: Beyond Corporeality in Time and Space. UK: Inter-Disciplinary Press, 2014. 22-34.Mauss, Marcel. “Techniques of the Body.” The Body: A Reader. Edited by Mariam Fraser and Monica Greco, New York: Routledge, 2005.Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. “Cezanne’s Doubt.” Sense and Non-Sense. Trans. Hubert and Patricia Dreyfus. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964. 9-25.Shilling, Chris. The Body and Social Theory. London: SAGE Publication, 1993. 10-12.Turner, Bryan S. The Body & Society Second Edition. London: SAGE Publication, 1996.
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Wilson, Shaun. "Situating Conceptuality in Non-Fungible Token Art." M/C Journal 25, no. 2 (April 25, 2022). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.2887.

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Introduction The proliferation of non-fungible tokens has transformed cryptocurrency artefacts into a legitimised art form now considered in mainstream art collecting as an emerging high-yield commodity based on scarcity. As photography was debated “of being art” in the late 19th century, video art in the 1960s, virtual reality in the 1990s, and augmented reality in the 2010s, NFT art is the next medium of artwork tied to emergent cultural forms. From the concept of “introducing scarcity from born-digital assets for the first time ever, NFTs or crypto or digital collectibles, as they are also referred to, have already shown glimpses of their potential'” (Valeonti et al. 1). Yet for NFT art, “numerous misconceptions still exist that are partly caused by the complexity of the technology and partly by the existence of many blockchain variants” (Treiblmaier 2). As the discussion of NFT art is still centred on questions of justifying the legitimacy of the medium and its financial trading, critical analysis outside of these key points is still limited to blogs and online articles as the mainstay of debate. To distance NFTs from a common assumption that they are in some form or another a populous digital fad, cryptocurrencies are intended primarily as currencies, even if they maintain some asset-like properties (Baur et al.). In a broader sense, NFTs have positioned digital art as a collectable staple as “the most common types are collectibles and artworks, objects in virtual worlds, and digitalised characters from sports and other games” (Dowling). As a point of origin "NFTs were originally developed using the Ethereum blockchain, [while] many other blockchain networks now facilitate trade and exchange of NFTs” (Wilson et al.). “Given NFTs link to underlying assets that are unique in some way and cannot be exchanged like for like” (Bowden and Jones), this article will consider how artists respond to this uniqueness, which separates the art as simply trading an artefact on a crypto platform, to instead consider a different approach that attests to legitimising the medium as a conceptual space. The concept of NFTs was first introduced in 2012 with Bitcoin’s “Colored Coins”, which referred to tokens that represent any type of physical asset “such as real estate properties, cars and bonds” (Rosenfeld). To that end, the origins of NFTs, as we know, attach themselves to rarities, much the same as any other luxury trading artefact. But where NFTs differ is, as a system, in the non-fungibility of their agency and, as an artefact, the singularity of their rarity and uniqueness. As an example in art, consider a Van Gogh painting where its rarity sustains its value, as there are only a certain number of Van Gogh paintings in circulation. Thus, the value of a Van Gogh painting in the domain of rarity is determined by its metadata with attention to the verification of the authenticity of the artefact and, among others, its subsequent details of the year it was painted. NFTs work along with the same premise: both the Van Gogh painting’s data and an NFT are non-fungible because they cannot be forged, but the painting is fungible because it can be forged. From here, there are two components to associate with NFT art. The first is the NFT, which is the data of a digital token registered on a blockchain. The second is the artefact associated with the NFT, which we know as NFT art. But the system by which NFTs exists as a blockchain is different from, say, buying shares listed in a stock market. Therefore, to find a conceptuality in NFT art, the idea of an NFT artwork as a singular tradable commodity needs to be rethought as not the artefact per se, but the effect of the condition brought about by a combination of the artefact, the currency, and nature of its transaction system. To think of these key points as an independent singularity dismantles any sense of a conceptual framework by which NFT art can exist beyond its form. As McLoughlin argues, “unlike the commercial gallery business model, NFTs are designed to cut out the need for art dealers, enabling artists to trade directly online, typically via specialist auction sites” (McLoughlin). With regards to the GLAM sector, the conceptuality of this disruption positions both the born-digital artefact and the system of trading of the artefact as inextricably linked together. Yet the way this link is considered, even by galleries and curators alike, invites further attention to see NFT art not as a fad, but as a beginning of an entirely new system of the digital genre. Background From an aesthetics perspective, recent hostility surrounding the acceptance of NFT art within the establishment has predictably taken issue with the low-brow nature of mainstream avatar-oriented NFT art; for example, Bored Ape Yacht Club and Cryptopunks not surprisingly have been at odds with “proper” art. More so, other artists who have used blockchain in their practice, including Kevin McCoy, Mitchel F. Chan, and Rhea Myers, contributed to early crypto art especially in the 2010s to be inclusive of the proliferation of NFT art as a fine arts medium. Yet despite these contributions, the polarising of NFT art within the art world, as Widdington asserts, has accounted for assumptions that NFT art is identified as being of populous kitsch, lowbrow images, where contemporary art is in opposition to the critique it subjectifies itself against. The art establishment’s disdain towards the aesthetics of NFTs is historically predictable. Early NFT art focussed on pop culture references that have significance within the crypto community (Pepe memes, collectible CryptoKitties), and similarly, in the 1980s, Jeff Koons forced the world of “high art” to confront and accept his works rejoicing in pop culture (Michael Jackson, Pink Panther; Widdington). A key point from Widdington’s claim can be attested for other art that came before Postmodernism, linked firmly to artists using identifiers as part of their studio practice. Moreover, the tying of artwork to a non-fungible identifier is not new. Sol LeWitt's Wall Drawing #793B Certificate (LeWitt) compounded his manifesto that “the idea becomes a machine that makes the art” (LeWitt). By adopting the practice that each of his artworks was accompanied by an authenticity certificate, where the identification code forced a fungible asset to be associated with a unique non-fungible asset, it is the ownership of a certificate of authenticity, or a smart contract on the blockchain in the case of an NFT, that makes the artist’s work unique and therein valuable (Widdington). The scarcity of born-digital assets drives demand for collecting NFT art and joins a financial aspect tied to the process of buying and selling crypto assets. This is obviously different from a crypto conceptuality which exists outside the process and thereby manifests in the idea of what intersects the process, and, in the case of NFT artworks, the subject of the image being traded. Just as LeWitt’s certificate of ownership was thought to raise questions about authenticity and uniqueness through abstract thinking, the concept of art derived from NFT art is fundamentally no different. Both use non-fungibility as a condition of their agency to first address what can be copied and what remains as unique. Second, the mechanism of a ledger that, for NFTs, is blockchain and, for a certificate of authenticity, is the assigned number of the unique identifier, regulates scarcity by using a system to define uniqueness. Adopting this manifesto invites a different way to consider NFT art when the main conversation about NFT art in popular journalism or blogging is a narrow discussion either about the legitimacy of NFTs as an authentic financial stock or about the amount of money they transact in collecting the artefacts. One such conceptuality is in the recent NFT artwork of Damien Hirst. NFT Art Damien Hirst’s The Currency “is composed of 10,000 NFTs linked to 10,000 individual spot paintings on paper” (Hawkins) which are inclusive of added security devices within the paper itself to make the physical asset unique. The purchaser can decide if they would like to own the NFT “or ... keep the physical work and relinquish rights to the blockchain-based artwork” (Goldstein). Perspectives of the project, despite the fact that “Hirst has become a renewed critical target in the left and left-liberal media” (White 197) for his NFT project, not to mention being lamented as “Thatcher’s Warhol” (Lemmey), range from indicating “greater fool theory” (Hawkins) to the questioning of a “responsibility to other NFT artists in the market” (Meyohas). However, discussion on the conceptuality created by The Currency, especially its ontology, is muted if not ignored altogether, which this article considers a fundamental oversight in any credible critical assessment of NFT art. Given that Hirst’s artwork has consistently been moulded around conceptual art, whereby the idea of art becomes the artwork not necessarily found in the hand-made aspect of the artefact itself, the idea of The Currency is to question the role and relationship of art and money through an allegory. One might argue that its conceptuality then affords the idea of the artwork being a currency in itself. It speaks to divisibility, just as the cryptocurrency used to purchase the artworks is divisible of its own tender. The disjuncture in this accord is that “NFTs are not currencies themselves, but rather more like records of ownership” (Cornelius 2). The dot paintings on paper are created as unique artefacts where their uniqueness makes them rare, and this uniqueness makes the rarity an increase in financial value. However, subverting this are Hirst’s physical creations, where the legal tender’s conceptuality is manufactured with watermarks, security embeds, and financial markings the same as traded bills. If this perspective is considered a concept, not a digital selling point, then The Currency prompts further debate on how NFT art can, on the one hand, disrupt the way we might think about the financial systems within cryptocurrencies, and on the other hand, fuel debate on how collecting art within traditional markets has been transformed through the emergence of cryptocurrencies. These once excluded forms of money, often thought of as scams, vapourware, and Ponzi schemes from collectable trade, now dwarf digital art auction sales at an exponential margin; see, for example, the recent Christie's sale of Beeple’s NFT art. When dissecting The Currency through a conceptuality, it is important to state that this is not the first time that artists have used currency to conceptualise social questions about money. At a system level, Marcel Duchamp created his work Monte Carlo Bond (Duchamp), which “advertised a series of bonds by which he claimed he would exploit a system he had developed to make money while at the roulette wheel in Monaco” (Russeth). At an artefact level, artist Mark Wagner “deconstructed dollar bills to make portraits of presidents, recreations of famous paintings and other collages” (Ryssdal and Hollenhorst). Most notoriously, “Jens Haaning was loaned 534,000 kroner ($116,106) in cash to recreate his old artworks using the banknotes [but] pocketed the money and sent back blank canvases with a new title: "Take the Money and Run" (ABC News). If anything, The Currency is merely one of many artists' responses in a long history of exploring art and money. Yet the conceptuality of Hirst’s tender lends itself to deploying a conceptual currency system that says more about the money transactions of the art world than it does about the art sold as a financial transaction. More so, a clever subversion by Hirst, whose ongoing thematic produces artworks about mortality, life, and death, places this thematic back on the purchasers of The Currency to decide if they will “kill” the tethered artwork; that is, if they accept the NFT and not the assigned NFT art, the artwork will be destroyed by an act of burning. Hirst’s conceptuality from The Currency forces the consumer to “play God” by deciding which component is destroyed or not, posing the moral question of how we value the immorality of destroying an artwork for the sake of profitability from a born-digital token. The twist at the end is that Hirst melds such a moral choice with “an experiment in the highly irrational economics of collectibles and blockchain technology” (Hawkins). While this article acknowledges that the extreme wealth of Hirst plays a determining factor in how The Currency has been received by the public, one might argue that such polarising opinions are of no value to the critical assessment of The Currency nor the conceptualities of NFT art when determining the mechanical aspects of the artworks. The same invalidation emerged in December 2021, when “a group of Wikipedia editors ... voted not to categorize NFTs as art—at least for now” (Artnews). This standpoint contradicts the New York Times, which referred to Beeple as the “third-highest-selling artist alive” after his Christie’s sale (Artnews). Bowden and Jones provide insight into this kind of hesitation in legitimising NFT art, saying that “the tension between innovation and incumbency also contributes to the scepticism that always surrounds such new technologies” (Bowden and Jones). Another example, Beautiful Thought Coins from Australian artist Shaun Wilson, is made up of 200 digital hand-drawn colour field NFT artworks that are an allegorical investigation into bureaucracy, emotion, and currency. “The project is complete with a virtual exhibition, digital art prints, art book, and a soundtrack of AI hosted podcasts exploring everything from NFTs to chihuahuas” (Lei). As with The Currency, Beautiful Thought Coins approaches a conceptuality about NFT art through its subject, but also in the embodiment of the currency embedded within the NFT digital ecosystem. Not surprisingly, the artwork depicts coins sharing a direct relationship to the roundel paintings of Jasper John and Peter Blake, but instead with the design proportions of the iconic Type C.1 roundels adopted by the Royal Air Force between 1942 and 1947. Merging these similarities between its pop-art heritage and historical references, the allegorical discussion in Beautiful Thought Coins centres around the pretext of bureaucracy that extends to the individual artwork’s metadata. As featured on its OpenSea sales window, each of the coins has substantial metadata that, when expanded to view, reveal a secondary narrative found in the qualities each NFT has linked to its identifier. Once compared with other tokens, these metadata expand into a separate story with the NFT artworks, using fictitious qualities that link directly to the titles of each artwork in the digital collection to describe how each of the coins is feeling. One might argue that in this instance, the linking of metadata narratives to the artworks functions as an ontological framework. Wilson’s coins draw similarly to philosophical questions raised by Cross, who asks “what, exactly, is the ontological status of an NFT in relation to the work linked to it?” (Cross). Likewise, in the exhibition catalogue of Beautiful Thoughts Coins, Church states that the ontology of this series appears to be linked to a conceptuality with more questions than answers about the ‘lifestyle’ bureaucracy attached to NFT art, where the branding of the artwork by a digital token will make you feel better with the promise to also make you potentially wealthy. (Church) When considering the nature of the artwork's divisibility, ontology plays a part in finding a link between its allegory and aesthetic. Given that each image of the roundels is identical, except for the colours that fill each of its four rings, the divisibility of the hue in the subject is likened to the divisibility of the cryptocurrency that purchases NFTs. Conclusion This article has discussed NFT art in the context of its emergent conceptuality. Through assessment of the crypto artwork of Hirst and Wilson, it has proposed a way of thinking about how this conceptuality can remove NFT art from a primary attachment to financial exchange, to instead give rise to considerations of the allegory surmounting both fungible and non-fungible artefacts linked to digital tokens. Both series of works draw allegorical commentary about the nature of currency. Hirst takes a literal approach to manufacture physical artworks as a mock currency linked to minted NFTs to discuss the transactions of money in art. Wilson manufactures digital artworks by creating images of coins linked to minted NFTs to discuss the transactions of AI-generated lifestyle bureaucracy controlling money. The assessment of both series has considered that each artist uses NFT art as modularity to represent their contexts, rather than a singularity lacking in conversation about the ontological implications of the medium. While NFT art is still in its infancy, this article invites a wider conversation about how artists can deploy crypto art in a conceptual space. It is by this factor that the plausibility of meaningful dialogue is active in determining the medium as a legitimised art form. At the same time, it explores the possibilities now and yet to come, to attest to defining a new dynamic art form, already changing the way artists think about their work as both a currency and a conceptual effect. References ABC News. “Danish Artist Takes Payment for Art, Sends Museum Blank Canvasses Titled Take the Money and Run.” 30 Sep. 2021. <https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-09-30/danish-artist-jens-haaning-take-the-money-and-run/100502338>. ———. “What’s behind the NFT Digital Craze?” 19 Mar. 2021. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=_e7TOBV43y8>. Aharon, David Y., and Ender Demir. “NFTs and Asset Class Spillovers: Lessons from the Period around the COVID-19 Pandemic.” Finance Research Letters (Oct. 2021). <https://doi.org/10.1016/j.frl.2021.102515>. Artnews. “Wikipedia Editors Have Voted Not to Classify NFTs as Art, Sparking Outrage in the Crypto Community.” 13 Jan. 2022. <https://news.artnet.com/market/wikipedia-editors-nft-art-classification-2060018>. Baur, Dirk. G., Kihoon Hong, and Adrian Lee. “Bitcoin: Medium of Exchange or Speculative Assets?” Journal of International Financial Markets, Institutions and Money 54 (2018): 117-89. Bowden, James, and Edward Thomas Jones. “NFTs Are Much Bigger than an Art Fad—Here’s How They Could Change the World.” The Conversation. 26 Apr. 2021. <https://theconversation.com/nfts-are- much-bigger-than-an-art-fad-heres-how-they-could-change-the-world-159563>. Church, Doug. Minting Conceptuality: Beautiful Thought Coins, GBiennale, 2022. <https://books.apple.com/us/book/beautiful-thought-coins/id1607731019>. The Conversation. “Damien Hirst Melds Art and NFT to Mess with Blockchain Investors.” 1 Sep. 2021. <https://thenextweb.com/news/damien-hirst-art-nft-blockchain-investors-syndication>. Cross, Anthony. “Beeple and Nothingness: Philosophy and NFTS.” Aestheticsforbirds, 18 Mar. 2021. <https://aestheticsforbirds.com/2021/03/18/beeple-and-nothingness-philosophy-and-nfts/>. Dowling, Michael. “Is Non-Fungible Token Pricing Driven by Cryptocurrencies?” Finance Research Letters 44 (Apr. 2021). <https://doi.org/10.1016/j.frl.2021.102097>. Goldstein, Caroline. “Damien Hirst’s NFT Initiative, Which Asks Buyers to Choose Between a Digital Token and IRL Art, Has Already Generated $25 Million.” Artnews 25 Aug. 2021. <https://news.artnet.com/market/damien-hirst-nft-update-2002582>. Hirst, Damien 2021. “The Currency.” HENI. <https://opensea.io/collection/thecurrency>. Hawkins, John. “Damien Hirst’s Dotty ‘Currency’ Art Makes as Much Sense as Bitcoin.” The Conversation 31 Aug. 2021. <https://theconversation.com/damien-hirsts-dotty-currency-art-makes-as-much-sense-as-bitcoin-166958>. Lei, Celina. “Future of NFTs Depends on ‘Who’, Not ‘What’.” Arts Hub 9 Feb. 2022. <https://www.artshub.com.au/news/features/future-of-nfts-depends-on-who-not-what-2526154/>. Lemmey, Hue. “Thatcher's Warhol: Damien Hirst.” Verso 12 Mar. 2012. <https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/946-thatcher-s-warhol-damien-hirst>. LeWitt, Sol. “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art – Sol LeWitt.” Art Forum 5.10 (1967): 87. Meyohas, Sarah. “Damien Hirst’s ‘The Currency’ Is Just Like Money, But Is It Good Art?” Coindesk 15 Sep. 2021. <https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2021/09/15/damien-hirsts-the-currency-is-just-like-money-but-is-it-good-art/>. McLoughlin, Rosana. “I Went from Having to Borrow Money to Making $4m in a Day’: How NFTs Are Shaking Up the Art World.” The Guardian 6 Nov. 2021. <https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2021/nov/06/how-nfts-non-fungible-tokens-are-shaking-up-the-art-world>. Price, Seth, and Michelle Kuo. “What NFTs Mean for Contemporary Art.” The Museum of Modern Art Magazine 29 Apr. 2021. <https://www.moma.org/magazine/articles/547>. Rosenfeld, Meni. “Overview of Colored Coins.” 4 Dec. 2012. <https://bitcoil.co.il/BitcoinX.pdf>. Ryssdal, Kai, and Maria Hollenhorst. “This Artist Cuts Up Cash and Uses It for Collage.” 7 Apr. 2020. <https://www.marketplace.org/2017/04/07/artist-cuts-cash-and-uses-it-medium/>. Russeth, Andrew. “Hard Cash: A History of Artists Using Money as a Metaphor – and a Medium in Their Work.” Artnews 24 Mar. 2020. <https://www.artnews.com/feature/money-medium-artwork-history-1202680319/>. Samarbakhsh, Laleh. “What Are NFTs and Why Are People Paying Millions for Them?” The Conversation 24 Mar. 2021. <https://theconversation.com/what-are-nfts-and-why-are-people- paying-millions-for-them-157035>. Treiblmaier, Horst. “Beyond Blockchain: How Tokens Trigger the Internet of Value and What Marketing Researchers Need to Know about Them.” Journal of Marketing Communications 22 Nov. 2021. <https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13527266.2021.2011375>. Valeonti, Foteini, Antonis Bikakis, Melissa Terras, Chris Speed, Andrew Hudson-Smith, and Konstantinos Chalkias. “Crypto Collectibles, Museum Funding and OpenGLAM: Challenges, Opportunities and the Potential of Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs).” Applied Sciences 21.11 (2021). <https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3417/11/21/9931>. White, Luke. “Flogging a Dead Hirst?” Events, Journal of Visual Culture 12.1 (2013): 195-199. Widdington, Richard. “NFTs as Conceptual Art? Why Not, Says MCA Denver.” Jing Culture & Commerce 27 Apr. 2021. <https://jingculturecommerce.com/mca-denver-nfts-wtf-webinar/>. Wilson, Kathleen Bridget, Adam Karg, and Hadi Ghaderi. “Prospecting Non-Fungible Tokens in the Digital Economy: Stakeholders and Ecosystem, Risk and Opportunity.” Science Direct Oct. 2021. <https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0007681321002019>. Wilson, Shaun. “Beautiful Thought Coins.” Open Sea 2022. <https://opensea.io/collection/beautiful-thought-coins>.
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