In the late 1640s, Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione produced two series of etchings, which historians have named his Oriental Heads, depicting a variety of figures in exotic headgear. The persistence of Oriental headdresses throughout the series suggests a pervasive interest in costume on the part of both Castiglione and his society. In the seventeenth-century Western European imagination, the turbaned figure represented the epitome of alterity: the Ottoman Turk. Signed “CASTIGLIONE, GENOVESE,” the etchings reveal the artist’s important Genoese origins as a part of his artistic identity. Castiglione’s eccentric tendencies, especially in his own personal mode of dress, coupled with the prevalence of exotic costume in the Oriental Heads speaks to the artist’s self-fashioned image as a fashionable, yet controversial eccentric persona. These etchings were tools to attract potential patrons, encourage buyers to purchase the etchings, and above all, to fashion his artistic identity in the international art center of Rome.

In this paper, I analyze the life and collection of Christina, Queen of Sweden (1626-1689), as a complex and shifting performance of gender, authority, and other aspects of identity. I argue that Christina’s education and life experiences actively informed her collecting preferences for certain types of mythological figures, which became an effective tool of her self-fashioning as a ruler who broke away from what she viewed as the confines and expectations of her gender. I will demonstrate how her strategies as an astute patron and collector of the arts were central to her subversive presentation as an almost androgynous self-exiled ruler in Rome, who could emulate both male and female virtues equally in order to transfer her former political power to new social and cultural capital. Christina’s collection, newly assembled in the Palazzo Riario in Rome, served this purpose by creating a controlled environment that enforced particular relationships between collector and spectator, spectator and collected objects, as well as among the objects themselves. This thesis weds the various theories of Queen Christina and her collection into a comprehensive theory of her larger project of self-fashioning, arguing that her collecting practices regarding both ancient and contemporary works followed a cohesive philosophy in her politics of collection and display, even while largely challenging the decorum of female patronage. Christina’s self-promoted identity as Minerva of the North forces the viewer to contemplate the items in the collection both on their own and in conversation with one another as part of a larger display. In the nudes of the Stanza dei Quadri on her second floor, as well as the antiquities featured on the ground floor, Christina used the relationship between images and sculptures to create an allegorical pantheon focused on her own self-control and authority. In understanding objects’ interactivity, it is possible to interpret Christina’s renovations to the Palazzo Riario and the display of her collection as a modern day Parnassus or Arcadia, which she used to establish her Roman home as a primary location of scholarship and creation. The contents and display of her collection extended her desired persona as a leader of wisdom and user of knowledge not easily bound by the constraints of either gender. The metaphorical space of Arcadia that she created strengthened her alignment with Minerva, the goddess of wisdom and warfare, and implicitly also with Apollo, who presided over Parnassus. In the case of Queen Christina, we have found that in addition to the personal prestige associated with obtaining valued items, the display of these items in a kind of curated space added value and meaning to the viewing experience. / Art History

Thesis advisor: Stephanie Leone / Despite a surge of scholarly and public interest in the mid-twentieth century, Mannerism remains an ill-defined and problematic period label. The first goal of my thesis is to define the style in its chronology and stylistic attributes. Noting its artificiality and the influence of self-fashioning, I identify its clearest definition in Giorgio Vasari's writing and art. Second, I discuss the use of the sophisticated style by the artist and his patron, Cardinal Alessandro Farnese, as a means of social advancement and legitimization. Finally, I analyze the iconography and style of the Sala dei Cento Giorni in the Palazzo della Cancelleria, Rome as the collaborative apex of the self-fashioning of Vasari and Farnese. / Thesis (BA) — Boston College, 2007. / Submitted to: Boston College. College of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Fine Arts. / Discipline: College Honors Program.

Marie de Gournay (1565-1645) was bold. Following a profound, epiphanic experience while reading Montaigne's Essais, she would turn the despair of a young woman, ambitiously seeking her own voice, into literary performances as part of a continuous exercise of staging herself. Indeed, she would fabricate for herself a mythic persona, a Virgo nobilis, in order to control her own destiny as an author, and as a literary, political and social commentator. She also had some very powerful friends and supporters. Following a prominent fifty-year career, though, she would virtually disappear from the French literary world. Shortly after her death, Gournay's work was erased behind the ridicule, parodies and mystification that had targeted her during her lifetime. Gournay would become counter-fashioned, her own myths turned against her. My intent in this study of Gournay's persona is to provide an example of the dynamics at work in subversive creations, specifically how the construct of Gournay evolved into what humanist Justus Lipsius had presaged as a novum monstrum.I propose to analyze the fabrication of her persona from two different perspectives: first of all, from the point of view of her own self-fashioning, how she appears as both author and character of her own creation, putting into flux the notions of copy - original and imitation - invention. Critical theories on reception, self-fashioning, mystification, originality and feminism will be used within the context of the development of politesse and the honnête homme, in early modern France. Close study of the works of fiction in which her persona appears, only to be mocked, and an analysis of texts which praised her will then reveal how and why Gournay continues to suffer from the binds constructed during the seventeenth century after which she, and many other women writers, were no longer read. She was either scornfully dismissed, or simplified to the point of distortion out of the need to classify and explain a woman whose positions and actions rendered her a phenomenon in a patriarchal society where women were excluded from creating meaning for themselves.

Self-image and the way we present ourselves to the world are highly relevant in today’s society, fostered to some extent by the ubiquitous use of technology. For example, the idealized body image that is disseminated in the media and on social networks can affect the relationship we have with ourselves. Beyond the idyllic images promoted by external agents, there is a personal aspect that also defines who we are and how we relate to our environment; that is self-fashioning, a constant self-driven, ameliorative change in accordance to the ideals promoted by somaesthetics. In line with this approach, our bodies could be understood as spaces for self-design to increase somaesthetic appreciation, both of ourselves and the world. This thesis discusses some early considerations for the development of self-fashioning technologies and the exploration of the design space. By conducting a soma-oriented workshop and a subsequent first-person exploration, I introduce a set of design features that might be addressed when devising embodied artifacts. They highlight the importance of "constant becoming," a situated ongoing process that shapes us, arguing that technologies for self-fashioning should support it. / Självbilden och hur vi presenterar oss för världen är högst relevanta i dagens samhälle, delvis underblåst av den allestädes närvarande användningen av teknik. Till exempel kan den idealiserade kroppsbild som sprids i medierna och på sociala nätverk påverka relationen vi har till oss själva. Utöver de idylliska bilder som främjas av externa agenter finns det en personlig aspekt som också definierar vilka vi är och hur vi förhåller oss till vår miljö; det vill säga self-fashioning, en konstant självdriven och förbättrande förändring i enlighet med de ideal som främjas av somaestetiken. I linje med detta synsätt kan våra kroppar förstås som utrymmen för självutformning för att öka somaestetisk uppskattning, både av oss själva och av världen. Denna uppsats diskuterar några tidiga överväganden för utformningen av self-fashioning teknologier och utforskningen av designutrymmet. Genom en soma-orienterad workshop och en efterföljande förstapersonsutforskning presenterar jag en uppsättning designfunktioner som kan hanteras när man designar inbäddade artefakter. De betonar vikten av "constantly becoming", en situerad pågående process som formar oss, och argumenterar för att teknologier för self-fashioning bör stödja det.

Drawing on the concept developed in Stephen Greenblatt’s Renaissance Self-fashioning: From More to Shakespeare, this thesis presents Heinrich Heine as an extreme case of the ‘self-fashioning’ writer. I argue that his preoccupation with self-construction determines what and how he writes, how he treats his reading public and, crucially, how he perceives and evaluates his own career. Though self-fashioning occurs in his earliest works, Heine’s decision to move to Paris (1831) was the single biggest self-determining act of his life; he constructs it as a moment of rebirth. Inspired by the July Revolution, he sought a new authorial identity in harmony with the supposed new world order and his own social, political and artistic ideals. However, the reality of juste-milieu society—a continual seesawing between modernisation and restoration—cast doubt on the possibility, even the desirability, of novelty and progress, the goals of revolution. In this context, Heine cultivates the identity of a perpetually embattled writer through confrontational dialogue with contemporary ideologies and his readership alike; ever ambivalent in his attitude to the role of art in a modernising world, he is also engaged in an internal battle with the self. First I show how he establishes himself in the role of cultural correspondent in the early journalism by developing a mode of self-conscious spectatorship which enables him to negotiate between contemporary French conditions and German readership expectations. Second I investigate the strategies he uses to free himself from his Buch der Lieder legacy and redefine his identity as a poet in Paris; I show how the Neue Gedichte (1844) are assembled to record and reflect on this transitional process, making the collection a monument to his self-fashioning tendencies. Finally I explore how Heine manipulates the relationship between public and private within a concept of self to construct his authorial identity; I consider a number of self-editing and self-reconstructive practices in prefaces, letters and autobiographical writing.

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This thesis analyses artefacts belonging to the playwright, socialist and critic Bernard Shaw, which form part of the collections at Shaw’s Corner, Hertfordshire, now managed as a National Trust property. My original contribution to knowledge is made by revealing Shaw through the artefacts in new or under-explored roles as socialist-aesthete, art patron, connoisseur, photographer, celebrity, dandy, and self-commemorator. The thesis therefore challenges the stereotypical views expressed in the literature which have tended to focus on Shaw at Shaw’s Corner as a Fabian with ascetic characteristics. The thesis aims are achieved by contextualizing the Shaw’s Corner Collections, both extant and absent. Historically the artefacts in the house have been viewed from the perspective of his socialist politics, ignoring his connoisseurial interests and self-fashioning. Hence there was a failure to see the ways in which these elements of his consuming personality overlapped or were in conflict. By examining artefacts from the perspectives of art and design history, focussing on furniture, private press books, clothing, painting and sculpture, Shaw is shown to be a highly complex and at times contradictory figure. The discontinuities and ambiguities become clearer once we examine the possessions from the house which were removed and sold by the National Trust after Shaw’s death. Whilst some Shavian scholars and art historians have acknowledged Shaw’s role as an art critic and the impact it had on his dramaturgy, there has been little recognition of the ways in which this influenced his domestic interiors, consumption, and personal taste, or indeed his interest in the decorative arts and design. Artefacts and furniture in the house today reflect Shaw’s role as a socialist-aesthete, and his involvement with Arts and Crafts movement practitioners and Aestheticism. As an art patron Shaw also shared the aims of artists, connoisseurs and curators working in the first decades of the twentieth century, and we see evidence of this through certain artefacts at Shaw’s Corner. With a strong aesthetic sense, he devoted time to matters of beauty and art, but was equally governed by economics and a desire to bring ‘good’ art and design to everyone. Shaw was considered to be one of the greatest cultural commentators and thinkers of his generation, but he was at the same time a renowned celebrity and influential figure in the mass media. The literature has tended to dismiss the latter role in order to preserve his place among the former, but I argue here that Shaw did not necessarily view the two as separate endeavours. In fact items from the house, notably Shaw’s clothing and sculpture, are considered as the bearers of complex philosophical, symbolic or iconographic meanings relating to his self-fashioning, aesthetic doctrines, and desire for commemoration, which demonstrate the links between the celebrity and the critic. By considering the artefacts in conjunction with the Trust’s archive of Shaw photographs, as well as his representation in popular culture, and by then relating this material dimension to his writings, the thesis brings a new methodological approach to the study of Shaw. More importantly this thesis reveals new knowledge about the philosophical ideas, humanity, generosity, and personal vanity of the man that lay behind those artefacts.

George Bernard Shaw exercised an above-average level of authorial control, which even extended to his relationship with his biographers. Shaw crafts a persona, with the help of his "authorized" biographer Archibald Henderson, which displays a process of evolutionary development and progress along the lines of the Shavian philosophy of the Life Force and the Superman. In essence, Shaw is casting himself as a prototype for the Superman through the autobiographical manipulation of his biographers and aesthetic modes of self-fashioning.

The image of Saint Petersburg has influenced the imagination of Russian writers since the establishment of this city in 1703. Today, it is common to speak about the Petersburg Text in Russian literature that has its own mythology, imagery, and stylistics. However, the research in this sphere is predominately concentrated on works written before the second half of the 20th century. This thesis addresses the revival of the Petersburg mythology in the 1990s in works by such authors as Mikhail Veller, Andrei Konstantinov, and Marusia Klimova. It illustrates how the reinvention of traditional Petersburg themes contributed to the representation of the "wild 1990s" reality. It also examines the influence of mass media and popular culture on the development of Petersburg narration in terms of genre, style, and the creation of an author's public persona. The cultural significance of the cityscape in these works is of particular interest.