Narrative cycles of St. Stephen, proto-martyr, are common, frequently found on ecclesiastical monuments of thirteenth-century France. The cathedrals of Bourges, Chartres, and Paris, to name only a few, support visual imagery inspired by the legend of Stephen. Ordained by the apostles, ostensibly to aid the widows and orphans of the congregation, Stephen quickly shows himself "full of grace and fortitude" (Acts 6:8). His inspired, vitriolic sermon incurs the wrath of the Jews who lead him from the city of Jerusalem and stone him. The prevalence of Stephen's cult in the Gothic cathedrals of medieval France has been recognized by scholars; however, little attention has been devoted to the bishops' development and use of the cult, or the churches' production or interpretation of visual imagery. Explanations of the extant images have been driven by text based, iconographic models, which have often obfuscated the relevance of intricate compositional elements and relationships that are key to a more artistically and historically relevant understanding of the compositions. The intricately sculpted Stephen cycles in thirteenth-century France and the historic circumstances that informed their conceptions and receptions are the subjects of this dissertation. Drawing from a survey of the extant, architectural, sculptural narratives and relevant historical resources, this dissertation begins with a discussion of the establishment and dissemination of Stephen's cult in France. The following chapters focus specifically on the thirteenth-century images at the cathedrals of Rouen, Arles, Paris and Bourges chosen for their intricacy and unique compositional formulations. Ultimately, I propose the retelling of the Jewish/Christian debate at the root of Stephen's story was subtly reconstructed by ecclesiastical officials and articulated by artists to reference and comment on contemporary anti-Jewish conflict and ideologies in the mind of the medieval, Christian viewer. I continue to argue that St. Stephen was an exemplar of ecclesiastical succession and an idealized manifestation of the extension of the bishop's power within the ecclesiastical hierarchy. In addition to situating the proto-martyr's imagery in social and political context, this endeavor also contributes to the broader understanding of the construction and function of pictorial, hagiographic narrative. / A Dissertation Submitted to the Department of Art History in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Spring Semester, 2007. / October 9, 2006. / Medieval Art, Gothic Sculpture, Paris Cathedral, Rouen Cathedral, Bourges Cathedral, Arles Cathedral, St. Stephen / Includes bibliographical references. / Cynthia Hahn, Professor Directing Dissertation; Paul Strait, Outside Committee Member; Paula Gerson, Committee Member; Richard Emmerson, Committee Member.

The annual Junkanoo festival in the Bahamas is regarded as "the ultimate national symbol," representative of Bahamian sovereignty and culture. A festival that originated from Bahamian slaves, Junkanoo has evolved into a popular commercial and cultural event that features extravagant, crépe-paper costumes. This paper analyzes the role of the commodified Junkanoo costume in constructing a Bahamian national and cultural identity. Specifically, it analyzes the history and policies of the National Junkanoo Museum, the first institution to display the costumes outside their performative context. Through a interdisciplinary approach that incorporates methodologies from art history, sociology, and museum studies, I argue that Junkanoo serves a commercial purpose, which the National Junkanoo Museum perpetuates by displaying the costumes for touristic consumption. My thesis is based on three separate grounds of analysis. First, I examine the festival's hybrid and dynamic nature by analyzing external factors that influenced Junkanoo's development. Notably, I consider the Ministry of Tourism and the Bahamian Development Board's involvement and administration of the parade, which significantly impacted the costumes' iconography, materiality, and ephemerality. Next, I view the National Junkanoo Museum within the context of other Caribbean Museums to conclude that the institution encounters similar challenges to its neighbors, which include reconciling the museum's nationalistic intentions with its objectives to bolster cultural tourism. Finally, I demonstrate how the National Junkanoo Museum diverges from standard museum practice in order to augment the country's fledging heritage industry. Instead of assembling a permanent collection, the museum operates as a non-collecting institution by exhibiting the costumes only on an annual basis and then returning the objects to the Junkanoo artists who proceed to dismantle and recycle their costumes. The museum's exhibition policy reflects the artists' habit of abandoning their costumes immediately following the parade. However, I contend that the National Junkanoo Museum's use of nostalgia as a museum epistemology is less about an effort to restore the costumes' traditional ephemerality, than it is an indication of the pervasiveness of the tourism industry in formulating a Bahamian national and cultural identity. Junkanoo's economic potential is dependent on the perception of the festival as an identifiable, authentic Bahamian product, which the government facilitates by promoting the costumes as national symbols of Bahamian culture and appropriating them into a national museum system. / A Thesis submitted to the Department of Art History in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts. / Fall Semester, 2009. / August 18, 2009. / Institutionalization, Fringe Costume, Iconographic Analysis, Commodification, Discourse Theory, Nostalgia, Social History / Includes bibliographical references. / Roald Nasgaard, Professor Directing Thesis; Karen Bearor, Committee Member; Michael Carrasco, Committee Member.

This dissertation examines the altar murals created by Jean Charlot at St. Francis Xavier's Catholic Mission, Naiserelagi village, Ra District, Fiji Islands. The church houses three of Charlot's frescoes, a triptych over the main altar and single panels over each of the two transept altars. Painted between October 1962 and January 1963, the central triptych, The Black Christ and Worshipers, measures ten by thirty feet and features a crucified Black Christ, while the side panels depict full body portraits of indigenous Fijians and Indo-Fijians presenting culturally appropriate offerings to Christ. The two side altar panels, St. Joseph's Workshop and The Annunciation, each measure ten by twelve feet. During his lifetime, 1898-1979, Charlot refined his knowledge of the fresco technique and painted murals at forty-five different sites in Mexico, the United States, and the Pacific Islands of Hawai'i and Fiji.1 I concentrate on Charlot's contributions as a mature artist by focusing on his little-known liturgical frescoes in Fiji. This text is the first serious academic study to document the history, social contexts, and commission of any of his frescoes in the Pacific Islands. Through my investigation, I demonstrate how his later Pacific works expressed relationships with local cultures and drew from his earlier experiences in France and Mexico. I explore the relationship that developed among artist, artwork, and audience. I argue that Charlot conceptualized his artistic works as "signs" that operated within both aesthetic and communication systems cross-culturally. I reconfigure signs within their cultural contexts to determine meaning from both the synchronic perspective of the artist, as well as a diachronic and multicultural perspective based on the three cultural groups who compose the major audience, Fijian, Indo-Fijian, and European. I address the history of liturgical art in the twentieth century by offering the first scholarly text to document thoroughly a major art form, Charlot's "Black Christ," in the syncretistic traditions of the Catholic Church as experienced in the Pacific Islands/Fiji. Charlot's Fijian frescoes embodied ideas integral to the future of the Catholic Church. In his Fijian murals, Charlot's incoporated local models, indigenous objects, and native flora, capturing the religious climate of the early 1960s and the changes brought about by Vatican II, changes that sought to define the future direction of the Church in relation to indigenous cultures in mission areas. While not overtly political, these ideas led to liberation theological movements, especially, Black theology, and, as such, advocated socio-political independence. As a colonized nation, Fiji's future in the 1960s depended on indigenous representation and self-determination. Charlot's Black Christ, with its native savior as the head of the Church, symbolized Fijian leadership and, by extension, sovereignty. Although Charlot's Fijian frescoes were a liturgical commission, the illustration of Fijian Black Christ triptych articulated post-colonial values. A public artwork, the Fijian frescoes transcended time, ethnic, and religious boundaries, extending even into the realms of national society. As a citizen of the United States, Charlot had pledged his belief in "one people under God." In his Fijian triptych, he promoted the idea of the "peace of God" and a universal humanity by presenting the diversity of creation; he painted the major ethnic groups of Fiji, native Fijian and Indo-Fijian, coming together as equals, regardless of social status, cultural background, or ethnicity. In Fiji, as in Hawai'i, Charlot's murals implicitly empowered Pacific Islanders through his monumental public images. He depicted local peoples within their cultural contexts and represented them as equals, not only in the eyes of God, but also in the eyes of the colonialists who dominated them. In his Fijian frescoes, Charlot painted a Fijian Black Christ and a natural "Paradise" for an audience of viewers in a post-colonial Pacific. Endnotes Zohmah Charlot, Jean Charlot Books, Portfolios, Writings, Murals (Honolulu: Private printing, 1986). Appendix 1. Jean Charlot's Fresco Murals. / A Dissertation submitted to the Department of Art History in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Spring Semester, 2005. / April 22, 2002. / Jean Charlot, Frescoes, Fiji / Includes bibliographical references. / Jehanne Teilhet-Fisk, Professor Directing Dissertation; J. Kathryn Josserand, Outside Committee Member; Tatiana Flores, Committee Member; Robert Neuman, Committee Member; Daniel Pullen, Committee Member.

Can an object be defined as votive solely based upon the presence of an inscription? Does relying upon such a definition restrict a more multivalent analyses of objects thus identified as votive? In this thesis, I examine the most prevalent practice used by scholars to identify votive offerings in the Middle Byzantine period – relying upon an object's accompanying inscription. This study focuses on those objects inscribed with a particular invocation – one that uses the word boethei. I demonstrate that we cannot rely on this inscription alone to identify an object as votive. It is rather the combination of many elements, including medium, iconography, patron and function that contribute to this identification and which enable us to more clearly understand the multivalent messages conveyed by these objects. In Chapter One, I turn to the context with which votive is most often associated – sacred. With each object I consider whether it is or is not votive and how the inscription contributes to that identification. In Chapter Two I examine objects inscribed with boethei that were intended for use or display in a secular context. While the objects discussed in Chapter One can be identified as votive, those discussed in this chapter cannot be so labeled. What then does the inscription mean in a secular context? In Chapter Three I present one object as a case study. I examine aspects of its production including inscriptions, patronage, iconography and function to argue that identifying a votive object requires a multivalent analysis of all its components. I show that, in this case, the patrons created a unified program of text, iconography and relics to convey their hope for salvation through perpetual prayer. I demonstrate that when all of these components are considered, we find a more precise message than what is explicitly stated in the inscription itself. / A Thesis submitted to the Department of Art History in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts. / Summer Semester, 2009. / June 24, 2009. / Votive, Byzantine, Patron, Byzantium, Byzantine Art, Bloodstone Pilgrimage, Seal, Icon, Ring, Processional Cross, Reliquary, Boethei, Theotokos, Inscription, Middle Byzantine Period, Prayer, Gift, Donor, Artophorion / Includes bibliographical references. / Lynn Jones, Professor Directing Thesis; Michael Carrasco, Committee Member; Richard K. Emmerson, Committee Member.

In 1516 Louise of Savoy, mother of the French king Francis I, undertook a pilgrimage to Provence to visit La Sainte-Baume, the grotto shrine of Saint Mary Magdalene, to whom she was particularly devoted. Accompanied by her son, daughter, and daughter-in-law, Louise made the pilgrimage to fulfill her vow to visit the shrine in exchange for the saint's protection of Francis during the Battle of Marignano the previous year. After visiting the holy grotto and the nearby Church of Saint-Maximin, which houses the Magdalene's relics, Louise and Francis made sizeable financial donations for the support and renovation of the shrine and abbey, as well as commissioning works of art for placement in the grotto as outward signs of their veneration of Mary Magdalene and gratitude for her protection. Upon returning home Louise commissioned the Franciscan priest Francois Demoulins de Rochefort to create a manuscript depicting the life of Mary Magdalene as a personal book of devotion and a commemoration of the royal pilgrimage. Demoulins collaborated with the illuminator Godefroy le Batave to create the Vie de la Magdalene (Paris, B.N., ms. fr. 24.955). The diminutive manuscript is composed of four parts--the text, which includes both narrative and commentary; the illuminations, which include miniatures of the saint's life as well as depictions of the shrine and relics; multi-lingual mottoes inscribed in the gold frames around the illuminations; and the colored frames with decorative motifs that surround the text. While ostensibly a saintly vita, the Vie de la Magdalene is, in fact, a complex work that functions on a number of levels. Although much of the manuscript's imagery and content aligns with major aspects of the medieval Magdalene legend, the Vie also has intriguing anomalies that do not have their source in traditional representations of Magdalenian hagiography. This dissertation examines the complexities of the Vie de la Magdalene to demonstrate how and why this vita differs from other accounts of the Magdalene's story. It argues that Demoulins and Godefroy manipulated the narrative, illuminations, mottoes, and decorative motifs of the manuscript to reflect the personal and political concerns of Louise of Savoy and her children. For example, the author establishes thematic parallels between events in Louise's life and the lives of both Mary Magdalene and the Virgin Mary, just as he makes correlations between Francis and Jesus Christ as Christian kings who are the sons of devoted and courageous mothers. Another example is the mottoes, which are written in French, Spanish, Italian, German, Latin, and two forms of Greek. The inclusion of these specific languages reflects not only an interest in humanism at the French court but also Francis's bid to become Holy Roman Emperor. Equally important are the aspects of the Vie that stress Louise and Francis's royal lineage as well as their perpetuation of the traditions, established by their regal ancestors, of devotion to Mary Magdalene and patronage to the Provençal shrine. A corresponding theme emphasizes the Magdalene's role as unctrice in the anointing of Jesus as the first Christian "king," and the significance of her actions to the sacre, the ceremonial anointing of French kings during their coronation. Using this theme of sacral anointing, Demoulins establishes a direct connection between Francis I, the newly crowned "Most Christian King" of France, and Jesus Christ, the "King of Kings." This study also demonstrates the manner in which the Vie de la Magdalene reflects the influence of three fifteenth-century French Passion plays. Demoulins incorporates into the Vie specific scenes, characters, text, and themes found in the plays, thereby increasing the dramatic and spiritual impact of the story for the manuscript's reader. In addition, Godefroy's design of certain miniatures mimics the traditional staging of these plays, and in particular, recreates the experience of viewing the scenes from a royal box, again emphasizing the regal station of the Vie's owner, Louise of Savoy. The last portion of the dissertation is an iconographic analysis of the decorative motifs on the narrative frames and a catalogue of the Vie, including translations of the text and mottoes, and detailed descriptions of the roundel images. This dissertation adds to the scholarship on the Vie de la Magdalene by examining the components of the manuscript as individual and interactive devices designed to stimulate the reader visually, intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually. Equally important, this dissertation reveals that the Vie de la Magdalene is replete with regal references intended to align Louise of Savoy and Francis I with their illustrious royal ancestors through their mutual devotion to Mary Magdalene and patronage to her shrine at La Sainte-Baume. / A Dissertation submitted to the Department of Art History in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Summer Semester, 2007. / April 19, 2005. / La Sainte Baume, Sacred, Anointing, Francois Demoulins De Rochefort, Godefroy Le Batave, Renaissance In France, French History, Illuminated Manuscript, Hagiography, Vita, Saints Lives, Symbolism, Hagiography / Includes bibliographical references. / Robert M. Neuman, Professor Directing Dissertation; Lori J. Walters, Outside Committee Member; Jack Freiberg, Committee Member; Paula Gerson, Committee Member.

Den japanska träsnittsrörelsen sosaku hanga utgör ett betydande men föga uppmärksammat konsthistoriskt kapitel. Under dess aktiva år från 1900-talets början fram till 1960-talet, introducerade den radikala förändringar hos Japans träsnittspraktik, samt kom att ur flera aspekter exemplifiera världshistorisk växelverkan. Östasiatiska museets drygt femtio sosaku hanga-föremål utgör en av de få offentliga samlingarna av rörelsen i Sverige. Kunskapen om och förmedlingen av denna samling har dock varit begränsade. I denna vetenskapliga rapport presenteras därför en grundlig studie av museets sosaku hanga-samling; dess omfattning, förvärv och proveniens, samt nyligen utförda exponeringar. Studien lägger således en grund för en framtida aktivering av samlingen som kan gynna institutionens uppdrag och vision. Rapporten utfördes i samband med en praktik på Östasiatiska museet under hösten 2020.

The portrait of sculptor emerged in the sixteenth century, where the sitter’s occupation was indicated by his holding a statue. This thesis has focus on portraits of sculptors at the turn of 1900, which have indications of profession. 60 artworks created between 1872 and 1927 are analyzed.  The goal of the thesis is to identify new facets that modernism introduced to the portraits of sculptors. The thesis covers the evolution of artistic convention in the depiction of sculptor. The comparison of portraits at the turn of 1900 with portraits of sculptors from previous epochs is included. The thesis is also a contribution to the bibliography of portraits of sculptors.

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Jag har undersökt hur tillståndet absorption kan användas för att förstå hur försjunkenhet skapas i en målning. Detta har gjorts genom en fallstudie av sex verk, tre av Anna Ancher och tre av Johannes Vermeer. Urvalet har berott på verkens fotorealistiska stil samt att de avbildar en kvinna utförandes en aktivitet, till synes försjunken i det hon gör. Jag har undersökt målningarnas olika beståndsdelar genom att använda mig av Ervin Panofskys ikonologiska och ikonografiska analys och sedan ställt dem mot Michael Frieds begrepp absorption i en jämförande analys. Jag har kommit fram till är att absorptionen och försjunkenheten i dessa sex verk syns genom den aktivitet som den avbildade figuren utför, figurens hållning och blickriktning. Ljussättningen och kompositionen bidrar även till en känsla av närhet och intimitet som förstärker känslan av försjunkenhet.

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