No description available.

No description available.

The thematic unit formed by the five versions of The Adoration of the Magi painted by Sandro Botticelli provide a special opportunity for studying his artistic development. An investigation of these five paintings shows that Botticelli aimed toward a goal of perfecting compositional techniques. He systematically made alterations to these works in order to create special point of view effects. / This thesis outlines the general trends in art with respect to the Adoration theme and then concentrates on a demonstration of Botticelli's attempts at correlating compositional devices and the unique features developed with respect to spectator involvement. This selected study allows for a careful examination which spans the artistic career of Sandro Botticelli. As a result, it can be shown that it was perhaps Botticelli, rather than Leonardo da Vinci, who was primarily responsible for the development of a compositional format which became a foundation stone of High Renaissance compositions.

No description available.

This thesis analyses selected paintings and aspects of life of the Italian Renaissance in terms of the aesthetic properties of sadistic and masochistic symptomatologies and creative production, as these have been explored by philosophers such as Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, Marcel Henaff, and Gilles Deleuze. One question which arises from this analysis, and is considered in this thesis, is of the relation between sexual perversion and history, and in particular between experiences of violence, (dis)pleasure and desire, and historically specific forms of discourse and power, such as legislation on rape; myths and practices concerning marriage alliance; the depiction of such myths and practices in art; religion; and family structures. A second question which this thesis explores is the manners in which sadistic and masochistic artistic production function politically, to bolster pre-existing gender ideologies or to subvert them. Finally, this thesis considers the relation between sadism and masochism and visuality, both by bringing literary models of perversion to an interpretation of paintings, and by exploring the amenability of different genres of visual art to sadism and masochism respectively.

No description available.