Thesis (M.A.)--University of Delaware, 2006. / Principal faculty advisor: Lawrence Nees, Dept. of Art History. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Universität Leipzig, 1910. / "Die Dissertation bildet das zweite Kapitel einer demnächst erscheinenden Arbeit, die den Titel tragen wird: Duccio di Buoninsegna, Studien zur Geschichte der frühsienesischen Tafelmalerei."--T.p. Includes bibliographical references.

Diss.--Kunstgeschichte--Berlin--Technische Universität, 1994. / Bibliogr. p. 244-271.

Several early Italian Renaissance sacred images underwent significant restorations shortly after their completion, despite the fact that the paintings had suffered no apparent damage. Paintings that were completed in the mid-to-late 1200s were restored only 30-40 years later. This dissertation explores the motivation behind the premature restorations of these intact and newly-created sacred images. As religious artworks, these objects were expected to move their viewers spiritually and to work as devotional intermediaries between the viewer and the sacred figures represented in the image. Some scholars contend that these paintings were prematurely restored in an effort to align the images with contemporary conceptions of style. Based on a scholarly analysis of historical and analytical literature, and close examination of the objects, this dissertation asserts a more compelling and nuanced motive for the restoration of these sacred images: these restorations were prompted by a desire to increase their spiritual efficacy by forging an empathic connection with viewers. The selective restorations primarily focused on repainting the faces and hands of important figures, with little or no repainting devoted to drapery, background or supporting figures. Repainting figures’ faces and hands enabled viewers to connect emotionally with these painted intermediaries and to create a greater empathic bond. I examine the motivation for artists to restore images prematurely and selectively within several contextual frameworks: the impact of viewers’ empathic connection with images is rooted in art historical and rhetorical theory and supported by current brain research; the appeal of early Italian Renaissance vernacular culture created a receptive environment for empathic connections to literature, poetry, devotional music and imagery; and early art historical writings on empathy. Chapter One examines the history of early Italian Renaissance restoration practices. Chapter Two explores how the art of Duccio di Buoninsegna and Giotto di Bondone motivated the selective repainting of devotional images. Chapters Three and Four present case studies of early Italian Renaissance sacred images that were prematurely repainted and reframed. Specific works examined include Coppo di Marcovaldo’s Madonna del Bordone, 1261, Guido da Siena’s Maestà, ca. 1270, and Taddeo Gaddi’s Madonna and Child with Four Saints, ca. 1340-45.

Duccio’s Maestà, made between 1308 and 1311 for the high altar of Siena Cathedral, is one of the best-known works of medieval painting. Astoundingly complex, with dozens of individual fields and several narrative cycles, it measured around 15 feet or four meters square. It was, and long remained, the largest panel painting ever made. But why did its designers reach so far outside the bounds of normal altarpieces, and why did they stretch the media of panel painting to new heights? Replacing Duccio’s Maestà within its original Trecento context demonstrates that the altarpiece cannot be explained by either earlier Cathedral images or by earlier Marian panel paintings made for monastic churches, whose imagery the Maestà appropriated but drastically expanded. Instead, the creation of Duccio’s Maestà comes into clearer focus when understood in its original setting, the civic Cathedral. Santa Maria della Assunta comprised not just its particular physical space, but a political and economic one. Duccio’s Maestà interacted with the specific, material building, especially the Cathedral’s unique hexagonal crossing and its dense green-black and white stripes; both features may have contributed to a reading of the Maestà’s central Virgin as a symbol for Ecclesia, occupying her own Temple of Solomon. But the Maestà also crucially served as the backdrop to the city’s biggest annual holiday, the Feast of the Assumption. Though generally characterized by scholars as a unifying event, the Feast was in fact a means of social control, regulated by the state, where participation was enforced by law and on point of fine, and whose main event was the legally mandated presentation of candles to the Virgin in the Cathedral. Moreover, Duccio’s high altarpiece was commissioned during a troubled period: threatened by plotting nobles, and having steered the city through a sensitive election for a new bishop, the Government of the Nine was increasingly intent on regulating the Assumption Feast and the Cathedral’s commissioning body, the Opera del Duomo, which was largely funded through the wax donated on the Assumption. Confronted by unique pressures, Duccio and his unknown potential collaborators created unique solutions, contextualizing popular Marian imagery within the Cathedral’s theological and political concerns through the use of elaborate narrative cycles. Faced with the puzzle of fitting an entire image program onto a panel painting, Duccio privileged a coherent spatial setting, drawn largely through carefully-depicted architecture, that allowed him to keep figure size constant and that therefore to create a smooth spatio-temporal reading of the altarpiece; his arragement of the narrative scenes allowed for new meanings and cross-readings; Duccio further used different perspectival constructions to direct the viewer’s reading of the altarpiece. Duccio thus turned painting’s limitation, its lack of time, into a strength, showing new ways in which images could be deployed to interpret narrative; he also spurred a long conversation among artists on the very nature of their medium and what, exactly, it could accomplish: Within 40 years, four altarpieces, occasioned again by architecture, were commissioned for the Cathedral’s patronal altars. Located near to Duccio’s high altarpiece, these altarpieces would reflect their artists’ reception of Duccio’s Maestà. These radical works by Simone Martini and Lippo Memmi, Pietro and Ambrogio Lorenzetti, and Bartolommeo Bulgarini include the first narrative altarpiece and probably the first painting to pretend it is a view through a window in Western art. Above all, the patronal altarpieces demonstrate an interest in narrative, played out in the depiction of time and an attendant depiction of commensurate pictorial space.

El eje central de esta tesis gira en torno al estudio del espacio perspectivo en la pintura primitiva italiana. Todos los argumentos y conclusiones extraídos proceden de una misma reflexión, la de descifrar el proceso utilizado por pintores como Giotto o Duccio al intentar resolver la sensación de profundidad en sus obras. En base a estos términos partimos desde la hipótesis de que los procesos de construcción espacial, ya sean geométricos o mentales, mantienen unas pautas similares, pudiendo simplificarlos e identificarlos como una serie de esquemas seudo-perspectivos. El principal objetivo de nuestro estudio será el de lograr traducir y simplificar dichos modelos espacio-perspectivos, con la finalidad de conseguir un conjunto de esquemas perspectivos válidos para la creación artística. Para ello hemos analizado un número de obras representativo de este período. El resultado de los análisis y su clasificación nos ha ayudado a entender el espacio perspectivo del Trecento y del Quattrocento italiano. Además, el proceso seguido para extraer dichos esquemas, impregnados del indudable valor plástico de las obras estudiadas, nos ha servido como herramienta en el intento de explorar nuevos caminos en la representación perspectiva. En base a esta idea hemos intentado conseguir modelos espaciales útiles para la creación artística sustentados en los resultados conseguidos. Con este propósito hemos ejemplificado cada modelo perspectivo mediante geometrías sencillas, capaces de mostrar el resultado obtenido y su posible extrapolación al campo artístico. / Conesa Tejada, S. (2011). PERSPECTIVA NATURALIS Y PERSPECTIVA ARTIFICIALIS, EL ESPACIO PERSPECTIVO EN LA PINTURA PRIMITIVA ITALIANA. PROPUESTAS PARA LA CREACIÓN ARTÍSTICA [Tesis doctoral no publicada]. Universitat Politècnica de València. https://doi.org/10.4995/Thesis/10251/11002 / Palancia

No description available.

Before the publication of David Hockney’s book Secret Knowledge: rediscovering the lost techniques of the Old Masters in 2001, it was commonly believed that the first artist to use an optical aid in painting was the seventeenth-century Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer. Hockney, however, believes that the use of projected images started much earlier, as early as the fifteenth-century, claiming that evidence can be found in the work of the Flemish painter Jan van Eyck. Without rejecting Hockney’s pioneering work in this field, I nevertheless make the perhaps bolder claim that Italian artists were using the aid of image projections even before the time of Jan van Eyck, that is, as early as 1270. Although much of the information required to make an earlier claim for the use of optics can be found in Hockney’s publication, the key to linking all the information together has been missing. It is my unique contention that this key is a letter that has always been believed to have been European in origin. More commonly referred to as Roger Bacon’s Letter I show in detail how this letter was, in fact, not written by Roger Bacon, but addressed to him, and that this letter originated in China. Chinese knowledge about projected images, that is the concept that light-pictures could be received onto appropriate supports, came directly to Europe around 1250. This knowledge was expanded upon by Roger Bacon in his Opus Majus, a document which arrived in Italy in 1268 for the special consideration of Pope Clement IV. The medieval Italian painter Cimabue was able to benefit directly from this information about optical systems, when he himself was in Rome in 1272. He immediately began to copy optical projections, which stimulated the creation of a new, more individualistic, mode of representation in Italian painting from this time forward. The notion that projected images greatly contributed towards the development of naturalism in medieval Italian painting replaces the previously weak supposition that the stimulation was classical or humanist theory, and shows that it was, in fact, far likely something more technical as well. / Art History / D.Litt. et Phil. (Art History)

Before the publication of David Hockney’s book Secret Knowledge: rediscovering the lost techniques of the Old Masters in 2001, it was commonly believed that the first artist to use an optical aid in painting was the seventeenth-century Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer. Hockney, however, believes that the use of projected images started much earlier, as early as the fifteenth-century, claiming that evidence can be found in the work of the Flemish painter Jan van Eyck. Without rejecting Hockney’s pioneering work in this field, I nevertheless make the perhaps bolder claim that Italian artists were using the aid of image projections even before the time of Jan van Eyck, that is, as early as 1270. Although much of the information required to make an earlier claim for the use of optics can be found in Hockney’s publication, the key to linking all the information together has been missing. It is my unique contention that this key is a letter that has always been believed to have been European in origin. More commonly referred to as Roger Bacon’s Letter I show in detail how this letter was, in fact, not written by Roger Bacon, but addressed to him, and that this letter originated in China. Chinese knowledge about projected images, that is the concept that light-pictures could be received onto appropriate supports, came directly to Europe around 1250. This knowledge was expanded upon by Roger Bacon in his Opus Majus, a document which arrived in Italy in 1268 for the special consideration of Pope Clement IV. The medieval Italian painter Cimabue was able to benefit directly from this information about optical systems, when he himself was in Rome in 1272. He immediately began to copy optical projections, which stimulated the creation of a new, more individualistic, mode of representation in Italian painting from this time forward. The notion that projected images greatly contributed towards the development of naturalism in medieval Italian painting replaces the previously weak supposition that the stimulation was classical or humanist theory, and shows that it was, in fact, far likely something more technical as well. / Art History / D.Litt. et Phil. (Art History)

Die Arbeit bezieht sich als interdisziplinär angelegte Untersuchung auf die Bildnisse der Marienmalerei vor und nach dem Tridentinum. Kunstwissenschaftliche, theologische und philosophische Implikationen stellen die Frage nach der Abbildbarkeit des Heiligen und die Einflussnahme der bildenden Kunst auf die Religiosität der Betrachter/Innen.