This dissertation explores the practice of contemporary artist Lawrence Weiner. From 1968 onwards, Weiner has presented his work using language and, as such, the artist is historically regarded as one of the pioneering practitioners of Conceptual art. The artist himself categorically refuses that designation, preferring to focus on the material aspects of his work. Nevertheless, his oeuvre has been largely received in terms of a predominantly linguistic intervention. Craig Dworkin encapsulates this position, when in discussing the Conceptual wager of Weiner's statements he writes: "Having tested the propositions that the art object might be nominal, linguistic, invisible, and on a par with its abstract initial description, the next step was to venture that it could be dispensed with altogether." By focusing equally on the linguistic and material aspects of Weiner's practice, this dissertation argues, conversely, that Weiner's work is primarily an object strategy, and not a dematerialized linguistic presentation. The first part of this discussion deals with Weiner's ground-breaking work from the mid 1960s to the early 1970s, analyzing the full implications of Weiner's extraordinary decision to present materials through language. Close comparisons are drawn with the profoundly materialist practices of contemporary artists such as Robert Rauschenberg, Carl Andre, Richard Serra and Robert Smithson. Weiner's use of language is also distinguished from the text-based works of Conceptual artists Joseph Kosuth and Douglas Huebler, problematizing the degree to which Weiner's statements can stand as an exemplar of postmodern textuality, inasmuch as their referential content remains of primary consequence. Several chapters of the dissertation focus on drawings, and in particular the artist's notebooks, an aspect of Weiner's practice that has remained largely unstudied. Crucially, the notebooks present a model of thinking which is wholly corporeal as opposed to purely analytical. Furthermore, they raise the problem of the visual in relation to a body of work that has been credited with the suppression of a traditional (optical) aesthetic. In being conceived by the artist as "maps," Weiner's drawings also invite an analysis of spatial considerations, and are thus linked to the artist's own designation of his work, not as art in general, but specifically as sculpture. Finally, the notebooks, like Weiner's films, practically dissolve the categories of reality and fiction. Indeed, Weiner himself would insist that every presentation of his essentially "realist" work is nonetheless inherently "theatrical." One of the long-standing criticisms of Conceptual art was that while it made aspects of circulation and distribution part of the work - thereby testing the limits of institutional constraint and expanding art's potential to engage in collective reception - it failed to achieve truly democratic access, in large part by neglecting issues of desire. Thus, Conceptual art's promise of collective accessibility was purportedly foreclosed by an art whose theoretical propositions lacked a democratic content. In closely considering the generic content of Weiner's work, this dissertation develops a picture not only of the concrete relationship between word and thing, but of the ways in which Weiner uses signs (drawings, text, films) to "objectify" desire, demonstrating that his "sculptures" must be seen as both conceptual and sensual, fully immersed in politicized questions of imaginary and bodily experience.

In 1933, after the election of the National Socialists in Germany, John Heartfield fled Berlin for Prague, leaving behind the significant intervention in contemporary cultural and social discourses that his photomontages for the Arbeiter-Illustrierte Zeitung comprised. While this body of work, produced from 1930, has been understood as Heartfield's master work, it has also often been understood as straightforward "popular front" propaganda and the accomplished embodiment of the "dialectical" method that were significant aspects of the cultural policy of the official left. There have been few attempts to work through the formally innovative aspects of Heartfield's particular "dialectical" method, and more broadly speaking, little critical consideration of the complex engagement of social realism that characterizes the A-I Z photomontages. Taking as a point of departure Heartfield's presence in institutional and scholarly discourses, and adopting an approach that is thematic rather than chronologically exhaustive, this dissertation investigates his collaborative engagements of performance, theatrical production, film, and the newly-emergent "photo book" to argue for a more nuanced treatment of the A-I Z photomontages than has been the case. Critical writing focused on the decade between Heartfield's Berlin Dadaist affiliations and his work for the Arbeiter-Illustrierte Zeitung has been conspicuously absent, and his work with film and theater have not been considered in relation to his photomontage practice of the later 1920s. Drawing on the theorizations of Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze regarding subjectivity and aesthetic engagement, the formation of cultural collectives, and processes of meaning production, this dissertation will argue that Heartfield's involvement in specifically performative cultural formations is central to understanding the advanced photomontage practice he developed, even as this orientation also rendered his intervention in the modes and institutions of cultural production incomprehensible to the various historical paradigms, left and otherwise, of modern art. In my conclusion, I draw Heartfield back into the present to consider the import and resonance of his interventions for contemporary interests and practices. Bringing recent theorizations of the public sphere in relationship to investigations of subversive subjectivities and models of meaning production formed around the "event," my dissertation argues for an expanded notion of aesthetic reception, critical realism, and "political" art.

Architecture was essential to the radical transformation of pilgrimage by the Catholic clergy in nineteenth-century France. To show how pilgrimage churches clericalized and modernized the devotions centered on sacred sites, this dissertation analyzes three important examples: Jacques-Eugène Barthélemy's Basilica of Notre-Dame de Bonsecours in Rouen (1840-44), Hippolyte Durand's Basilica of the Immaculée-Conception at Lourdes (1862-72), and Victor Laloux's Basilica of Saint-Martin in Tours (1886-1925). In the process, this study reveals the Catholic context of nineteenth-century French ecclesiastical architecture. Pilgrimage churches were paid for by the private donations of Catholics and their construction was overseen by priests: they were less determined by the government architectural bureaucracy than other churches. Notre-Dame de Bonsecours is a landmark of the beginning of the Gothic and Marian revivals during the July Monarchy. Influenced by Catholic authors and architects, the parish priest chose to give the basilica a thirteenth-century style, and a coordinated decoration that put Bonsecours at the forefront of the regeneration of religious art. In the midst of rapid industrialization, he and the donors sought to recreate an ideal medieval social order structured according to Christian principles. The Basilica of the Immaculée-Conception demonstrates the endurance of Catholic theories of the Gothic in the Second Empire, as well as a new preoccupation with economical church construction. The basilica evoked both twelfth-century churches and nineteenth-century mass production, thereby complementing the clergy's promotion of the pilgrimage to Lourdes as a continuation of medieval traditions and a modern spectacle. Erected above the grotto of the apparitions, the basilica reinforced the dogma of the Immaculate Conception and its ultramontane and legitimist implications. In contrast, the Basilica of Saint-Martin is proof of the influence on the clergy of Christian archaeology. A liberal bishop chose to evoke the fifth-century church that had stood on the site of Martin's tomb, in opposition to an intransigent lay group that wanted to rebuild the eleventh-century church that had stood there. While the lay project expressed a counter-revolutionary narrative of expiation, the built church connoted early Christianity and reflected a shift among the faithful towards accepting the Republic. This dissertation argues that, owing to their distinctive patronage model, pilgrimage churches expressed more clearly than other churches the evolving politics of French Catholicism.

Martial and bellicose imagery, as it commonly occurred in Mesoamerican monumental art, was almost universally reductive and allusive. It can be divided into a few major categories that are notable for their stability over two millennia and across the distinct, yet interrelated cultures of the region: emblematic motifs, solitary or processional warrior figures, individual debased captive figures, and captor-captive pairs. Depictions of actual battles, however, were notably rare. The handful of surviving examples - murals from the sites of Bonampak, Cacaxtla, Chichén Itzá, and Mulchic - are among the masterpieces of Precolumbian painting. The unprecedented dramatic complexity and heightened narrativity of these battle scenes - qualities produced by the presence of pictorial elements including action, specificity, variation, integration, and naturalism - contribute to a marked difference in their implicit content compared with other, more iconic artworks referencing warfare and militarism. Although these paintings are found at geographically distant sites and are stylistically unrelated, their approximate contemporaneity suggests that the brief, unprecedented appearance of battle murals in Mesoamerica was directly related to the widespread socio-political upheavals associated with the decline of Teotihuacan and the Classic Maya collapse during the Epiclassic period (c. 650 - 1050 A.D.), the time at which they were created. Their direct showcasing of feats of bravery and military prowess - both those of the rulers themselves and of their numerous allies and supporters - indicates a significant shift in the way legitimized authority was conceived during this period. Additionally, the radically different conception of temporality underlying these images points to an erosion in the unique status claimed by rulers with regard to the marking, and perhaps even the production of time. The fact that such violent tableaus were no longer produced during the documentedly militaristic Postclassic period reaffirms that, rather than directly reflecting social realities, monumental art projects a constructed image of legitimized authority. Nevertheless, an analysis of the functional characteristics of these artworks and the reconstruction of their implicit messages provide evidence with regard to the bases upon which rulership was conceived to be established during the Epiclassic.

This dissertation examines contemporary Native American art after postmodernism. It argues that this art can best be understood as an agent within the global indigenous rights movement. Employing an object-based methodology, it shows that three particularly important works by the artists Jimmie Durham, James Luna, and Alan Michelson recover histories and strategies of Native cultural diplomacy as a means of challenging cultural erasure and political domination. I suggest this can be understood as a Native rights version of what Hal Foster calls the "archival impulse" in contemporary art after postmodernism. Diplomatic in effect, this Native art engages international viewers in an argument about justice, challenging a largely non-native audience to recognize the ethical legitimacy of Native empowerment and the contemporary relevance of indigenous political and cultural models. These models, which I put in dialogue with the indigenist philosophy of Taiaiake Alfred, the recent writings of art critics like Foster, and interviews with each of the artists, are presented as alternative models for all peoples. Against what Alfred calls the "culture war" of contemporary globalization--which aims to extinguish indigenous cultural frameworks once and for all--this art establishes a "regime of respect" among peoples with different visions for their respective futures. In so doing, it asserts balance and solidarity against the explosion of inequity within both the contemporary art world and the neoimperial lifeworlds of globalization. I organize my research into four chapters. The first chapter unpacks the uncertain place of Native art within postmodern and globalization discourse developed largely without reference to indigenous rights. It proposes an alternative framework of indigenist "diplomatic aesthetics" for understanding the way contemporary Native art globalizes indigenous ideals of international relations. The subsequent chapters examine three twenty-first century artworks, each of which recovers a diplomatic model and cultural framework specific from the history of the artist's tribe. These are cases studies of diplomatic aesthetics. My close analysis of specific art works, their multiple historical and cultural imbrications, and their global context and agency is meant to counter the limited engagement with specific art works in existing context-driven scholarship. It also counters the postmodern framing of Native art, which problematically emphasizes "identity" and "representation" over the politics of sovereignty, indigenous intellectual paradigms, or the global agency of Native art and ideas.

This dissertation investigates the appropriation of natural history and vernacular comedy into the descriptive secular paintings of three Lombard artists: Giuseppe Arcimboldo, Vincenzo Campi, and Bartolomeo Passerotti. Their paintings feature, on the one hand, highly veristic portraits of flora and fauna and, on the other, comic elements such as coarse subject matter, erotic puns, and parody--a combination that demands further consideration. Since "counterfeiting" nature or imitating it "exactly as it appears" was often evaluated as a dubious or ambivalent pictorial practice in the theoretical literature of the Renaissance (especially in the later Cinquecento), the incorporation of descriptive techniques, vocabularies, and values from critically legitimate sources--that is, from natural history, a burgeoning scientific discipline, and from vernacular comedy, an established literary genre--into a descriptive aesthetic was particularly advantageous for these three artists. Their shrewd use of science and comedy as providing the intellectual foundation for descriptive painting is interpreted, therefore, as part of an aesthetic "reform" of description and its critical reputation. Considering that all three artists were from the historic Lombard region--known for its veristic approach to pictorial representation--their rehabilitation of descriptive painting is also considered in relation to cultural debates in sixteenth-century Italy, the most prevalent being the defense of regional dialects and traditions against the hegemony of the Tuscan language and Tuscan-Roman tradition. Here, vernacular comedy provides the clearest inspiration since comic writers like Ruzzante (Angelo Beolco) and Pietro Aretino were explicit in their dismissal of literary Tuscan as the standard language for poetic expression. The reform of descriptive painting in Lombardy, therefore, is considered as polemical in nature. Chapter One establishes the foundation of the dissertation by examining the evaluation of description in Renaissance art theory from Alberti to Zuccaro. Chapter Two examines Arcimboldo's deep engagement with natural history during his employment for the Habsburg emperors. It considers how his "composite heads"--the result of a paradoxical combination of empirical "truth" and inventive artifice--manipulate techniques and values from natural history to meet the creative and inventive demands of art. The humor in Arcimboldo's composite heads is identified and considered in relation to the learned tradition of burlesque poetry. Chapter Three examines Vincenzo Campi's adoption of the descriptive language and themes from vernacular comedy, in particular the rustic farces of Ruzzante, into his secular paintings of peasants selling fruit, fish, and fowl. The second part of the chapter investigates how Campi's veristic depictions of "still-life" conform to certain conventions of natural history illustration and display: clarity, variety, and order. In Chapter Four, Passerotti's problematic secular paintings are interpreted through the lens of comedy as parodying classical or idealizing literary and pictorial traditions. Following this, the artist's descriptive portrayal of aquatic and ornithological specimens in his peasant market paintings is considered in relation to natural history illustration and the prodigious activities of the Bolognese naturalist Ulisse Aldrovandi. Passerotti's incorporation of natural history is considered alongside his study of anatomy; both form the scientific or intellectual foundation of his art. The dissertation concludes with a discussion of Caravaggio, the Lombard "realist" from the succeeding generation. The empirical and comic elements discernible in his early secular paintings reveal how deeply Arcimboldo, Campi, and Passerotti--the Cinquecento "reformers" of description--may have influenced his radical cultivation of descriptive painting in the next century.

More than fifty examples of works by Paul Gauguin, Jan Toorop, Bart van der Leck, and Piet Mondrian demonstrate the significant influence of artifacts, newly revealed since the early nineteenth century, from the ancient Orient, that is, Pharaonic Egypt and biblical lands. The individual interest of these artists is analyzed in four monographic chapters, which indicate enough similarities in their interpretation and use of the ancient motifs to constitute a new departure in Orientalism. Their particular approaches bring out as well particular biographical, symbolic, and iconographic insights into their artistic development. As a leading symbolist painter, Gauguin pioneered the revival of sacred art involving old and new myths of Orientalism, which were critical also for Toorop, van der Leck, and Mondrian. Characteristically, all four artists assimilated ancient Oriental artistic conventions as a form of primitivism a return to original purity -- to create radical images about personal and social renewal. The primordial figured also in the narrative and symbolic synthesis of their art. Stylistically, all of their work became more decorative, two-dimensional, and more compatible with the architectural plane; line and color were released from mimetic servitude, and a pictographic aspect was added. Gauguin, Toorop, van der Leck, and Mondrian all integrated ancient Oriental motifs into their work, but each to his own ends. While Gauguin appropriated Achaemenid Persian and Egyptian art, van der Leck studied Egyptian, Assyrian, and Sumerian art, and Toorop and Mondrian relied on Egyptian art. Though Gauguin discussed music as a paradigm in the new art, the musical quality of Egyptian and Assyrian (and even Sumerian) art made a greater impact on the work of the Dutch artists. Likewise, they embraced the social and mural tradition of ancient Oriental art as a model for their own attempts to reintegrate architecture with utopian art. The dissertation has answered my original question regarding the impact of ancient Oriental art on progressive artists at the turn of the century. The project has also brought surprises, in the form of many unexpected connections between artists and other members of the European intelligentsia, which merit further exploration.

The fifteenth century in Italy is often studied for its revival of antiquity, but looking at this revival through the particular lens of Bacchus and his band of ecstatic followers reveals a unique view of the complex texture of the intellectual, cultural, and artistic fabric of the Renaissance. Although Bacchus, as a god of wine and revelry, was not an obvious role model for Renaissance patrons, he appeared nonetheless in drawings, paintings, engravings, plaquettes, and sculpture, and in marriage parades, banquet entertainments, plays, and songs. This dissertation examines how and why such a god and his wild cohort could acquire such a broad appeal and what they signified to their contemporary audiences. Stepping off from Aby Warburg's insight that emotionality is a third vector of historical measurement in addition to form and content, we first explore what it was in ancient Bacchic art that appealed to Renaissance artists striving to reinvigorate their work, finding that they were drawn to its expressive realism, shown with vigorous movement and figural variety, as well as its portrayal of lassitude and voluptuous pleasure. We look also at shifts in ideas about invention, imagination, composition, and imitation, and their impact on how artists viewed this antique inheritance and found inspiration in the Bacchic figures. Philosophical concepts, especially Neoplatonic ideas of inspiration and Aristotelian notions of Necessity, are considered for their impact on the meanings gleaned from Bacchic imagery. Each member of the Bacchic retinue is then explored to determine how his or her gestural vocabulary was employed, and what meanings he or she was made to bear in new settings. The frenzied maenad, with her hints of madness and untamed eroticism, was transformed into grieving Mary Magdalenes, heroic Judiths, and dancing Salomes, or was prettified into all'antica serving girls, nymphs, and personifications. The discovery of a sleeping Ariadne, unveiled by a satyr, contributed to one of the more popular motifs of the Renaissance, which even in new contexts retained associations with the epiphany and resurrection experienced by Ariadne when she was rescued by Bacchus. Revived epithalamic traditions employed the Triumph of Bacchus and Ariadne as a metaphor for both the taming forces of marriage and the bittersweet aura of youth and love. The frolicking, ithyphallic satyr embodied visions not only of a lost Arcadia, but also of the balancing forces of nature that require sexuality to sustain life. Tales of Silenus' wisdom inflected Renaissance depictions of the dissipated old satyr with contemporary notions of the morosoph, or wise fool. And as a symbol of the cosmos, Pan became the leader of a revived pastoral mode, a noble prince for a restored Golden Age. As a fecund, frenzied god, Bacchus came to embody the newly awakened Neoplatonic notion of divine furor: the inspiration that fueled all transcendent thought and creative imagination. At a moment when visual artists were striving to attain the status of their poetic counterparts, Bacchus epitomized the nature of artistic frenzy as a complement to the poet's Apollonian furor. The Bacchanalian paintings commissioned for Alfonso d'Este's Camerino d'Alabastro in Ferrara were a final flourish to this revival of Bacchus (before the archaeological and mythographical rigor of the mid-sixteenth century reduced him to a stereotype). The god's associations with love and fertility enhanced the duke's self-presentation as a magnanimous, liberal, and prolific ruler. The presentation of Epicurean delights signified a true understanding of an elevated voluptas, which saw the greatest good attained through the metaphor of sensual pleasures. Titian's paintings fully materialized the energy and pathos that first attracted the early Renaissance artists to Bacchic imagery.

The Last Judgment and the Making of the Golden Calf in the Church of the Madonna dell'Orto in Venice are two of the tallest canvas paintings ever created, each measuring some 14.5 m (47.6 feet) high. At this scale these pictures are clearly statements, made by an artist accustomed to confrontation. Jacopo Tintoretto (c.1518-1594) executed the pair of paintings around 1558-60 for the choir of his neighborhood church, in a commission that he apparently initiated himself, asking payment only for materials. The novelty of their monumentality and indeed their preeminence within Tintoretto's oeuvre were noted by early biographers. The paintings have received little attention in modern scholarship, however, which has tended to prioritize instead as his greatest accomplishments the Miracle of the Slave (1548) - Tintoretto's first picture in a series for the Scuola Grande di San Marco - and the dozens of canvases for the Scuola Grande di San Rocco (1564-88). Moreover, the initial paintings for both of these scuola cycles have been regarded in the literature as among the artist's most pivotal moments, overshadowing his work in the intervening decade of the 1550s, particularly the Last Judgment and the Making of the Golden Calf and a group of important paintings leading up to them. This dissertation argues that, far from being outliers in Tintoretto's oeuvre, the choir paintings for the Madonna dell'Orto - in their scale, technique, iconography, and personal meaning - should be seen as key steps in the artist's personal development and public achievement. Moreover, they represent a critical moment of arrival, summing up, in a grand statement of self-promotion, his work of the 1540s and 1550s. These two paintings must also be viewed as Tintoretto's response to the adversity he endured in the first half of his career. Spurred by his own ambition, faced with the hostility of artistic rivals both old and new, and inspired by an enduring ambition to challenge Michelangelo, Tintoretto initiated the two gigantic choir paintings about the year 1558 to revive a career that had flagged since his triumphant debut with the Miracle of the Slave a decade earlier. An examination of Tintoretto's biography, the intentions behind and reception of individual pictures, his stylistic and technical development, the influences of critics and fellow artists, together provide for the first time a detailed analysis of the painter's evolution in the period around the Miracle of the Slave and the dozen years that followed. This is the stage of his career that prepared Tintoretto to take on the challenges of the Scuola Grande di San Rocco and the massive commissions for the Palazzo Ducale. The turbulent decades of the 1540s and 1550s show an artist in process, on the verge of becoming the master who would dominate painting in Venice in the second half of the sixteenth century.

"The Practice of Theory in Vincenzo Scamozzi's Annotated Architecture Books" provides an examination of the architecture books owned and annotated by the Vicentine architect and architectural writer Vincenzo Scamozzi (1548-1616). It is an established historiographical conviction that printed treatises fundamentally changed the practice and reception of architecture in sixteenth-century Italy. Surprisingly little is known, however, about the ways these treatises were received and employed at the time they were made. The traces of Scamozzi's reading reveal how a major architect and theorist processed and applied bookish knowledge. Taken together, they provide important new insights into the contemporary significance of printed books within the architectural culture of late sixteenth-century Venice. Scamozzi is unusual in that a substantial number of his annotated books survive. This study considers this archive of response as a corpus for the first time. His annotations indicate the wide range of disciplines pertinent to early modern architecture, from mathematics to philology; indeed, his library is characteristic of the scholarly interests and practices of his day. For Scamozzi, architecture was a scienza rooted in universal principles, and architectural writing was essential to promote the utility of the profession. Reading itself, however, was not a straightforward activity. Scamozzi's reading depended on multiple factors, ranging from the nature of the material object to the probative methods of the author, and it was contingent upon his own interests and goals. Using Scamozzi's copies of Vitruvius (1550, 1556, 1567), Sebastiano Serlio (1551) and Pietro Cataneo (1567) as case studies, this study shows that Scamozzi used his books as instruments for literary and observational study, architectural practice, contemporary criticism, and as a platform to manufacture and control his public image. Scamozzi operated within an intellectual culture at once entrenched in the classical past and concerned with the advancement of present and future knowledge. His reading archive demonstrates how books shaped his understanding of each. This account argues that our historical understanding of the Renaissance architecture treatise has been overdetermined by its text, treated in isolation. Scamozzi's books and reading notes challenge the notion that print had a prescriptive effect on architectural thinking, showing that our evolutionary narrative about the treatise has not taken sufficient account of the historical circumstances that conditioned its forms.