Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2006. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 67-11, Section: A, page: 4015. Adviser: Jonathan Fineberg. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 257-284) Available on microfilm from Pro Quest Information and Learning.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2007. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 69-02, Section: A, page: 0410. Adviser: Eric Hostetter. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 379-392). Available on microfilm from Pro Quest Information and Learning.

abstract: Morgan Library MS M.905 (the Geese Book) is the last known illuminated gradual produced for the Church of St. Lorenz in Nuremberg, Germany. The Geese Book, which was created during the early sixteenth century, has been in the collection of the Morgan Library since 1961. This thesis describes the iconography of the eight historiated initials that illustrate the earthly life of Christ from the Annunciation to the Ascension. A detailed description of the content of each initial is followed by a brief history of the iconographic development of the identified event in order to determine whether or not the Geese Book uses a standard or nonstandard iconography. The results of this analysis reveal how this manuscript fits into the broader contexts of Christian art as well as the specific time and place of its creation. It shows that the iconography of the Geese Book reflected current theological beliefs and societal norms and allowed contemporary viewers of the Geese Book to feel a strong connection to the depicted events. / Dissertation/Thesis / M.A. Art History 2011

The pictorial representation of suicide in medieval culture has attracted little scholarly examination. This lacuna stands in contrast to the work of social historians and literary scholars, who have demonstrated the rich potential the subject of suicide holds for study of the Middle Ages. Filling this gap, my dissertation examines the genesis, formal and iconographic developments, and social functions of images of self-killing in early and high medieval art through an analysis of the suicides of Judas Iscariot, King Saul, and Queen Dido in selected artworks from France and Germany. Locating representations of these figures' suicides at the intersection of medieval intellectual and social history, this dissertation reveals how the iconography of suicide in the Middle Ages developed from and embodied complex social, religious, and political attitudes rather than reflecting an unchanging Christian prohibition. Chapter one charts the emergence of a distinct Christian ethos on suicide and its impact on the visual arts, and explores how this ethos engendered the creation of a negative iconography of suicide based upon the hanging of Judas Iscariot. Chapter two examines the development of the iconography of Judas' suicide between 800 and 1150 in illuminated manuscripts and French Romanesque architectural sculpture, probing the relationship between the image and religious thought and exegesis, liturgical ritual, and eleventh- and twelfth-century discourses over simony. Chapter three reveals how the image of King Saul's suicide was a subject of particular interest to royal Carolingian and Capetian patrons, who employed the image as part of their visual rhetoric of kingship. Chapter four examines the medieval reception history of the pictorial and literary image of the suicide of Queen Dido, arguing that twelfth-century French and German vernacular translations of Virgil's Aeneid inspired in thirteenth-century manuscript illustration a renewed interest in portraying her death. Chapter five summarizes the dissertation's conclusions, and is followed by three iconographic appendices recording all known images of the suicides of Judas, Saul, and Dido in medieval art to the year 1400. As this dissertation demonstrates, if suicide were considered an unforgivable sin in the Middle Ages, it was by no means an unrepresentable one.

Looking beyond mushroom-cloud imagery, this dissertation investigates the greater effect that radiation science had on intellectually and imaginatively stimulating the visual artists László Moholy-Nagy, Ralston Crawford, Ben Shahn, and Bruce Conner, who sought knowledge of the long-range consequences of nuclear testing. Primarily concerned with the specter of the tests' aftermath rather than the spectacle of the explosions themselves, these artists explored the toxicity of radiation and ultimately discovered, I argue, that they lived in perpetual and uneasy co-existence with their subject. This study chronologically follows the course of scientific inquiry into radiological effects, from the Second World War to the height of the Cold War, beginning in the first chapter with a discussion of the role of nuclear medicine in the work of Moholy-Nagy. In postwar Chicago, he developed his earlier engagement with x-ray photographs into a deeper knowledge of atomic processes, which culminated in two paintings that suggest the healing and hazardous effects of nuclear energy. The second chapter considers Crawford's commission by Fortune magazine in 1946 to illustrate an atom-bomb test in the Pacific, for which he made several renderings based on post-blast meteorological and radiological data. The critical response to these works exposed not only the public's lack of understanding about the invisible phenomena of the bomb, but also Crawford's own loose grasp of the pertinent science. Continuing the focus on newsworthy nuclear events, the third chapter examines Shahn's portraits of J. Robert Oppenheimer, following the latter's official censure by the Atomic Energy Commission in 1954, and Shahn's paintings and drawings about a contemporaneous fallout disaster leading to the death of a Japanese fisherman. Both series link the heedless actions of scientists and their government employers to the rise of universal radiation sickness, precipitated by what Shahn perceived as mass dehumanization. The fourth and final chapter addresses Conner's long-held view that San Francisco, the city in which he lived, was radioactively contaminated and a potential target of nuclear attack. Through the representation of self-destruction in his assemblages and films, Conner mimed a cultural malaise that struck him as particularly rampant in the local environment of nuclear experimentation.

This dissertation pioneers an ecocritical examination of the colossal monument Appennino (1580) by Giambologna (1529-1608). Because of its scale, form, and materials, the Appennino calls attention to the natural environment in an emphatic manner. A sculpted human figure, a representation of a mountain, and discrete passages of natural landscape are present in it. Living rock, fragments of lava and stalactites, and plant life simultaneously figure the human form and the Apennine landscape. These figurations prompt consideration of the relationships between art and nature and between illusion and materiality in Renaissance art. These interactions can be understood not only as generative processes, but also in terms of destructive ones. I argue that these art-nature and human-landscape interactions illuminate environmental concerns of the Renaissance. A central concern of this dissertation is how the interactions between art, nature, and beholders in the Italian Renaissance reflect latent ecological anxiety. To demonstrate this, I take the Appennino as a point of departure and situate it within multiple frameworks: sixteenth-century natural history, botanical, and geological endeavors; early modern reception of landscapes; art historical tropes of art-nature relationships; and Renaissance artists' engagement with nature. In Chapter One, I survey the scholarship on this monument and explain how the materials used to create it were understood, used, and valued during the Renaissance. In Chapter Two, I discuss the comprehension and experiences of mountains and caves (the environments that produced the Appennino's materials) in the Renaissance. In Chapter Three, I examine the multiple iterations of landscape within the monument, drawing attention to art theoretical issues such as "third nature," the "image made by chance," and tension between illusion and materiality that are manifest in the Appennino and that illuminate its entropic situation. In Chapter Four, I also consider the multiple ways that the human figure can be understood relative to the monument and how the Appennino's figural form engages art history in an exceptional manner, destabilizing conventional art historical notions of form and style. Finally, I evaluate the ecological and ecocritical significance of the monument's afterlife, arguing that the Appennino maintains an ambivalent relationship with nature.

abstract: Matilda of Canossa (1046 to 1115), the Great Countess of Tuscany, was a noblewoman, a warrior, and a papal supporter who later generations adapted to satisfy a variety of cultural and ideological interests. Matilda's life as a ruler was amplified over the following five hundred years in an avalanche of words and images that served many purposes. This thesis considers the art produced during her lifetime in the context of disputes over papal authority, as well as art produced about Matilda subsequently. The study includes a discussion of her appearance in Dante's Comedy; her importance to Florentine artists such as Sandro Botticelli, Leonardo da Vinci, and Michelangelo Buonarroti in the 16th century; and concludes with the significance of the elaborate tomb sculpted for her reburial by Gian Lorenzo Bernini in St. Peter's Cathedral. An examination of Matilda through these shifting representations from the 12th to the 17th century enables an understanding of how and why she became an impressive symbol in the visual arts. Finally, the study examines the process through which a strong, powerful woman was transformed from an historical person to a legend. Matilda's remarkable life and myth is still relevant to art historical, religious and cultural studies because of the pervasiveness of her influence a millennium after her death. / Dissertation/Thesis / M.A. Art History 2012

abstract: Modern perceptions and stigmas have long been the bane of historical scholarship, and ancient Greek pederasty is no exception. Pederasty was a multifaceted practice which reflected the ideals and self-perception of the elite in Athens, while simultaneously propagating the hegemony of that class, yet it is often unfairly subjugated under the overly broad categorization of "homosexual practice." By examining the individual societal areas of pederasty - warfare, gymnasia, symposia, and hunting - through an analysis class, the discussion of pederasty can be shifted to assess the practice as "homosocial." Through this analysis of class, it can be demonstrated that the practice was one which had motivations that lay in the complexities of Greek social structure and not simply in eroticism. Through a class analysis, pederasty can also be seen as the ultimate, tangible expression of a union between male citizens and the profound desire for interpersonal connection. / Dissertation/Thesis / M.A. Art History 2012

abstract: In this thesis, I investigate the anatomical excesses represented in the works of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. In recent years, art historical scholarship on Ingres has multiplied after being quiescent for much of the twentieth century, as contemporary scholars perceive the unusual contradictions in his works. I introduce the concepts of pathological versus imaginary distortions. Pathological distortions are distortions that represent diseased bodies, such as the goiters in many of Ingres's female figures, whereas imaginary distortions are not anatomically possible, such as the five extra vertebrae in the Grande Odalisque. Ingres employed both of these types of these distortions in his bodies, and I discuss how these two types of distortions can be read differently. My thesis is that Ingres employed extended anatomical variations-in his paintings, most notably in his female figures, for several reasons: to reconcile his anxiety about originality while remaining within the tradition of Classicism and "disegno," to pay homage to his predecessors who were also the masters of line, and to highlight his command of line and drawing. Though Ingres has never been a strictly Neoclassical artist in the Davidian tradition, the Romantic elements of his work are underlined further by these anatomical variations. / Dissertation/Thesis / Masters Thesis Art History 2015

abstract: Peacocks are ubiquitous in art. Artists from societies across the globe, undoubtedly attracted to the male peafowl’s colorful plumage and unique characteristics, used images of the bird to form visual semantics intended to aid in the understanding of a work of art. This was particularly the case in Europe, where depictions of peacocks appeared in Christian art from the onset of the continent’s dominant religion. Beginning in Early Christianity, peacocks symbolized the opportunity for an eternal life in heaven enabled by Christ’s sacrificial death. Illustrations of peacocks were so frequent and widespread that they became the standard symbol for eternal life in Christian art consistently centered on recounting the stories of Christ’s birth and death. Overtime, peacock iconography evolved to include thematic diversity, as artists used the peacock’s recognizable physical attributes for the representation of new themes based on traditional ideas. Numerous paintings contain angels wings covered in the iridescent eyespots located on the male peafowl’s tail feathers. Scientifically known as ocelli, eyespots painted on the wings of angels became a widespread motif during the Renaissance. Artists also recurrently depicted the peacock’s crest on figures of Satan or Lucifer in both paintings and prints. Indicative of excessive pride, a believed characteristic of peacocks, the crest is used as an identifying characteristic of the fallen angel, who was cast from heaven because of his pride. Although the peacock is a known iconographic motif in medieval and Renaissance art history, no specific monographic study on peacock iconography exists. Likewise, representations of separate and distinctive peacock characteristics in Christian art have been considerably ignored. Yet, the numerous artworks depicting the peacock and its attributes speak to the need to gain a better understanding of the different strategies for peacock allegory in Christian art. This thesis provides a comprehensive understanding of peacock iconography, minimizing the mystery behind the artistic intentions for depicting peacocks, and allowing for more thorough readings of medieval and Renaissance works that utilize peafowl imagery. / Dissertation/Thesis / Masters Thesis Art History 2016