The effusion of music-making angels in medieval art stood in opposition to the fact that in Scripture, angels did not perform music, and to contemporaneous beliefs that they were both bodiless and silent. This rupture between signification and idiom suggests that angel-musicians were more than passive symbols of “concelebration,” the idea that angels and humans performed the liturgy in concert with one another. I propose a synthetic account of their meanings and functions, focusing on Trecento Tuscany as a place where diverse artistic modes and devotional practices blended and clashed. Because the medieval Church evolved images and rituals based on the notion that angelic ministry was exemplary for human practice, I have organized my chapters around four key precepts of angelology: the angels’ liminality, operations in the aesthetic realm, ideal enactment of the liturgy, and multiplicity. Considered in these terms, images of angel-musicians effected the presence of actual angels in order to entice human viewers into joining their liturgy mystically, an act of profound spiritual benefit. This contention is predicated on the beliefs that although angels were technically ineffable, they were also able to traverse the divide between heaven and earth. By mediating the sensible and suprasensible, the images achieved their goal by facilitating individual acts of contemplation; by aestheticizing the spiritual sweetness of angels’ song; by modeling the angels’ roles as co-worshippers, ministers, and celestial assistants; and by proliferating in all types of sacred art, in which they were forces of active engagement that helped to “angelize” people’s mental worlds and ritual behaviors. / Art History

This study examines three related exhibitions from the spring of 2014: the Whitney Biennial, the Whitney Houston Biennial, and the Last Brucennial, assessing the problematics invoked across all three shows, including representation in the art world; the nexus of contemporary feminist art, theory, and its display; and the role of exhibitions and display in creating meaning in the contemporary art world. The analysis begins with reviews, interviews, and other primary-source documentation of the three shows. The second chapter then situates the projects among an art historical continuum. The third and final chapter of the thesis conducts a theoretical analysis, utilizing methodologies from performance studies and visual cultural studies. The three chapters and their attendant methodologies build toward the conclusion, which suggests that the 2014 Whitney Biennial, Whitney Houston Biennial, and Last Brucennial interact with one another and through a rich, complex web of contemporary art practices and conditions to create meaning and perhaps foment change. / Art History

Caravaggio's Madonna dei Palafrenieri has a long history of scholarly attention, dating back to contemporary writers such as Giulio Mancini and Giovanni Baglione. However, literature on the altarpiece has largely been concerned with one matter of the painting's past, its rejection. This thesis will begin by providing a historical and religious context for the creation and reception of the Madonna dei Palafrenieri, and will discuss the subject matter, theology, iconography and visual qualities of the painting. In order to clear away the long debated issue of the painting's removal, and therefore move on to interpreting it in more nuanced terms, counter arguments will be made for each of the often-cited causes of the altarpiece's rejection. Finally, the major focus of this paper will tackle an area not yet discussed with respect to the Palafrenieri altarpiece: the Church's use of tradition, particularly its contemporary interest in sacred history, as a means to reinforce its legitimacy, not just in doctrine and practice, but in visual expression as well. / Art History

My dissertation “The Facture of Non-Linear Perspective in Quattrocento Florence” challenges the scholarly focus on linear perspective during this period by considering the theoretical knowledge of optics by artists as well as the artisanal experimentation with materials in creating pictorial space. This research hinges on Leonardo da Vinci’s (1452-1519) definitions of multiple types of perspective, including color, acuity, and aerial perspective. In looking back across the fifteenth century, there was consistent interest on the part of Florentine painters, sculptors, and goldsmiths in portraying optically convincing landscape spaces that did not necessarily adhere to a strict geometric construction. My approach to this subject utilizes technical studies from restoration and conservation campaigns over the past several decades to uncover the material composition and procedures used by these artists to achieve these goals. Compared against instructional treatises on artmaking, the innovative deviations from common preparatory methods and the incorporation of the oil medium from economic exchanges with Flanders at the end of the century demonstrate a curiosity and experimental turn by these Florentine artists. By taking pursuing this avenue of inquiry, my dissertation bridges the period writings on optics with the networks of shared knowledge in the unique interdisciplinary workshop environment of Quattrocento Florence. / Art History

Thesis (B.A.)--Boston University. University Professors Program Senior theses. / PLEASE NOTE: Boston University Libraries did not receive an Authorization To Manage form for this thesis or dissertation. It is therefore not openly accessible, though it may be available by request. If you are the author or principal advisor of this work and would like to request open access for it, please contact us at open-help@bu.edu. Thank you. / 2999-01-01

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Horace Pippin (1888-1946) was a self-taught American artist who served in World War I. While he used art as a therapeutic outlet to process the horrors of war, his work also served as documentation of the environmental scars that were enacted upon the landscape. This paper will examine his war paintings through an ecocritical lens using Pippin’s style, technique, and subject to argue that the artist overlaid his personal war experiences onto his images of battlefields. The resulting perspective will connect the marks left on nature by military techniques with the artistic marks Pippin enacted on his canvases, one mirroring the other. This is specifically noted through the metaphorical and physical scar of trench warfare on the environment, which I argue Pippin emphasized in his painted scenes. I will then compliment this physical scarring with an examination of the therapeutic role painting played for Pippin in processing the emotional scars of war that continued to plague him well after the ceasefire. In this thesis, I will examine Pippin’s style, method, and subject matter, while considering both preliminary sketches and finished paintings. This study of Pippin’s work will culminate with the painting The Ending of the War, Starting Home completed in approximately 1933. It visually represents the moment of German surrender in dark, muted tones with stark brush strokes. The layering of paint and carved frame create a sculptural effect, and it is these marks fashioned by the layered brushwork that mirror the trench scars. Ultimately, this painting stands as one of the strongest examples of Pippin’s work to be considered with an ecocritical perspective. / Art History

<p> This dissertation examines the architectural patronage of a small cadre of industrialists, textile millowners, who controlled the city of Ahmedabad, India economically and politically between Indian independence in 1947 and 1968, the year communal riots shattered that city's self-image. It examines the role modern architecture played for these elites in projecting Ahmedabad as a modern, cosmopolitan city, though one steeped in a unique history and culture. On the one hand, modern architecture was used to promote the city as a node in the global network of capital and industry that developed after the Second World War. As such, most of the architects selected by these industrialists came from the ranks and institutions of the global modern movement, mirroring the industrialists' attempt to place the city's industry into global networks of capital and development. On the other hand, the millowners employed modern architecture as a way to naturalize Ahmedabad's sweeping social changes, so that they appeared as an inevitable outgrowth of Ahmedabad's and India's own history. In this, the modern architecture of Ahmedabad was suffused with references both to Ahmedabad's textile industry and India's imagined and historical past. </p><p> The first chapter examines projects that represent the industrialists' earliest overtures towards the global network of modern architects and institutions. The goal of the projects, which included an unbuilt store by Frank Lloyd Wright, a store inspired by Buckminster Fuller's geodesic domes, and Achyut Kanvinde's Gropius influenced ATIRA headquarters, was to instantiate a capitalist model of modernity in Ahmedabad through the fostering of consumer markets and the rationalization of industry. The second chapter delves further into the millowners' use of modern architecture for the instantiation of capitalist values and self-representation by comparing the city's two most famous modern projects: Louis Kahn's Indian Institute of Management and Le Corbusier's Millowners' Association Building.</p><p> The third and fourth chapters turn to the cultural and domestic sphere, exploring projects that negotiated modern, Indian identity in the public and private context. Cultural institutions by architects like Le Corbusier, Charles Correa, and Balkrishna Doshi interrogated the relationship between the elite's new vision for Ahmedabad and the city's history. Meanwhile houses by many of the same architects for industrialists showed a modern domesticity that negotiated between community, the joint family and the individual by fusing modern forms to older domestic spatial organizations.</p><p> This dissertation contributes to the growing body of research focused on the role modern architecture played in shaping postcolonial Indian identity and subjectivity. While previous research has often focused on the patronage of the socialist state, the examination of the patronage of an elite group of capitalists shows how modern architecture became the locus for debates about the direction of modern Indian society. Further, the dissertation's focus on capitalist patronage places this dissertation in a larger body of research that traces the connections between capital and modern projects, though such issues have rarely been explored in the Indian context.</p>

<p>For what secular purposes did Spanish artists absorb into Marian Immaculate Conception devotional art the attributes of the Apocalyptic Woman from the Book of Revelation? In this absorption of a traditionally active Apocalypse motif into a traditionally inactive Marian motif, were artists and patrons responding to religious, political, and cultural turmoil of multi-faith Iberian societies? I argue that a shift in Marian iconography paralleled consolidation of Castilian national identity in the late-fifteenth and early-sixteenth centuries. This consolidation manifests in the Virgen Abridera at the Convent of the Concepcion de las Madres Agustinas, dated 1520 in Toledo, Spain. This mutable sculpture, also called a Shrine Madonna, Triptych Virgin, or Vierge Ouvrante, is an example of the tota pulchra Immaculate Conception motif, the absorption of Apocalyptic Woman imagery, and the transference in narratives from the Joys of Mary to the Sorrows of Mary?all the products of contemporary Franciscan and Spanish worldviews.

What is the nature of art/science collaborations in museums? How do art objects and activities contribute to the successes of science centers? Based on the premise that art exhibitions and art-based activities engage museum visitors in different ways than do strictly factual, information-based displays, I address these questions in a case study that examines the roles of visual art and artists in the Exploratorium, a museum that has influenced exhibit design and professional practice in many of the hands-on science centers in the United States and around the world. The marriage of art and science in education is not a new idea - Leonardo da Vinci and other early polymaths surely understood how their various endeavors informed one another, and some 20th century educators understood the value of the arts and creativity in the learning and practice of other disciplines. When, in 2010, the National Science Teachers Association added an A to the federal government's ubiquitous STEM initiative and turned it into STEAM, art educators nationwide took notice. With a heightened interest in the integration of and collaboration between disciplines comes an increased need for models of best practice for educators and educational institutions. With the intention to understand the nature of such collaborations and the potential they hold, I undertook this study. I made three site visits to the Exploratorium, where I took photos, recorded notes in a journal, interacted with exhibits, and observed museum visitors. I collected other data by examining the institution's website, press releases, annual reports, and fact sheets; and by reading popular and scholarly articles written by museum staff members and by independent journalists. I quickly realized that the Exploratorium was not created in the way than most museums are, and the history of its founding and the ideals of its founder illuminate what was then and continues now to be different about this museum from most others in the United States. This dissertation presents an account of the history of the institution and the continuing legacy of the early Exploratorium and its founder, Frank Oppenheimer. I argue that the institution is an early example of a constructivist learning museum. I then describe how art encourages learning in the museum. It provides means of presenting information that engage all of the senses and encourage emotional involvement. It reframes familiar sights so that viewers look more closely in search of recognition, and it presents intangible or dematerialized things in a tangible way. It facilitates play, with its many benefits. It brings fresh perspectives and processes to problem solving and the acquisition of new knowledge. This project is the study of an institution where art and science have always coexisted with equal importance, setting it apart from more traditional museums where art was added as a secondary focus to the original disciplinary concentration of the institution. Many of the exhibits were created by artists, but the real value the visual arts bring to the museum is in its contributions to processes such as inquiry, play, problem-solving, and innovation.