This thesis examines the reconstructed altarpiece formed by the Madonna del Voto, the Coronation of the Virgin, and the twelve narrative panels dated circa 1267 and attributed to Guido da Siena, currently dispersed in museums in Europe and America. The reconstructed altarpiece is vital to the study of early Sienese art because of its association with the Madonna del Voto in Siena cathedral, the most venerated icon believed to be once on the high altar. If proven, it represents a significant rediscovery of an altarpiece commissioned to commemorate the miraculous intercession of the Virgin who granted Sienese victory over Florence in 1260 at the Battle of Montaperti, giving birth to Siena’s identity as ‘the City of the Virgin’. Moreover, it reveals a more comprehensive view of the precedent of the complex altarpiece, the Maestà by Duccio di Buoninsegna dated 1308-11. However, the unconventional format and the iconographical programme of Guido’s reconstructed altarpiece has been criticised, and its original location on the cathedral high altar is questioned. The four chapters of this thesis reassessed the validity of the reconstruction of Guido’s altarpiece and its original location on the high altar by combining the methodological tools of altarpiece studies and pictorial narrative studies. Chapter 1 clarified that the reconstruction is highly probable from a technical viewpoint. Chapter 2 proposed an alternative interpretation of the historical documents suggesting its original location on the high altar. Chapters 3 and 4 examined the two extra-biblical episodes (the Ascent of the Cross and the Coronation of the Virgin), which are often associated with Franciscan commissions, and argued that they were selected to emphasise the Virgin’s intercession. The reconstructed altarpiece of exceptional format and iconographical selection was thus probably an invention for the important commission for Siena cathedral where art embodied the Marian civic identity.

The approach to this thesis uses political history to interpret art history. The following chapters are dedicated to uncovering how artists defined Germany’s various lands. The analysis of identities in the paintings in this thesis are considered to be intangible, for at times artists are clearly constructing regional identities, particularly in the Worpswede colony. Others, such as the Eifel landscapes, are conscious markers of a national identity and attempts to combine it with the local. The Dachau paintings expand the issue further since, as it is argued here, Bavaria aspired to be a nation-state in its own right so artists represented a regional (Dachau) identity and federal and national (Bavarian) identity both of which fed into an overarching national (German) identity. The identities studied in this thesis are not binary; one does not exclusively dominate the other, but are constructed in a constant negotiation between the local, regional and national. As such this study participates in a wider dialogue that has exploded since the 1960s in sociology and beyond about the formation of identity.

攝影的出現對傳統繪畫產生了創作意義上的變化；它為繪畫提供了新的閱讀的方式讓新藝術家有機會從新審視以繪畫作為媒介的創作，從而理解到繪畫和攝影之間的微妙關係。掌握攝影與繪畫兩種媒介的獨特言語，應用到創作之上是藝術家當前的首先要考慮的。 / 本文藉着引用不同以繪畫作為媒介的藝術家的例子，探討攝影如何影響到繪畫創作。並且說明繪畫創作在回應當代藝術發展的多樣性。 / The emersion of photography had made a change to the significant of traditional painting. It provides a new way of perusing painting, giving new artists an opportunity to examine creation that using painting as a media anew, in which to understand the subtle relationship between painting and photography. It is crucial for artists to grasp the unique languages of both media before applying on artistic creations. / This thesis explores how photography has or could influence painting through studying different cases of artists who used painting as a medium; and to illustrate how painting creation responded to the artistic development diversity. / Detailed summary in vernacular field only. / Detailed summary in vernacular field only. / 劉彥韜. / "2012年9月". / "2012 nian 9 yue". / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2012. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 35). / Abstract in Chinese and English. / Liu Yantao. / Chapter 一 --- 攝影的出現 --- p.1 / Chapter 1.1 --- 「靈光」消逝的年代 --- p.2 / Chapter 1.2 --- 觀看方式的改變 --- p.5 / Chapter 1.3 --- 重新閱讀繪畫 --- p.7 / Chapter 二 --- 繪畫與攝影之間的關係 --- p.11 / Chapter 2.1 --- 曾是對立的關係 --- p.12 / Chapter 2.2 --- 互相作用 --- p.13 / Chapter 2.3 --- 攝影的元素：「知面」與「刺點」 --- p.16 / Chapter 三 --- 繪畫創作回應當代藝術的可能性 --- p.20 / Chapter 3.1 --- 照片使用的情況 --- p.21 / Chapter 3.2 --- 手藝的堅持 --- p.24 / Chapter 四 --- 附錄--我的繪畫創作 --- p.26 / Chapter 五 --- 參考書目 --- p.35 / Chapter 六 --- 圖片來源 --- p.36

Although it was an era of extraordinary scientific progress and fertile methodological debate, the seventeenth century was characterized by a profound vein of scepticism that can be traced throughout its literary, scientific and philosophical works. Upon his arrival in Italy, the Spanish painter Jusepe de Ribera (1591-1652), one of the most innovative interpreters of Caravaggio’s painting in Europe, wittily thematized, through his series of the Senses (c.1612-1616), the aspirations, achievements and doubts of his age with regard to man’s sensorial experiences and the possibility of investigating and comprehending the functioning of the senses. Scholars have singled out both the allusions within Ribera’s paintings to scientific experimentalism and their affinity with the themes which characterised contemporary Spanish picaresque literature. However, neither the ‘picaresque vein’ nor the scientific factors in question have been analysed per se, or indeed been examined comparatively. In this regard, my main contention is that, by juxtaposing the tools of the new science with low-genre props, the Senses series clearly alludes to contemporary discussions about the function and reliability of sensory perception, a theme which was then of the utmost importance. By staging the equivalent of the pícaro, the shabby protagonist of numerous novels who has to constantly struggle for his existence and who is both assisted and misled by his senses, Ribera’s series parodies not only the experimental method which had been established by the Roman and Neapolitan members of the Accademia dei Lincei, but also Galileo’s contributions to the debate. By the same token, his connection with picaresque literature is often reduced to Ribera’s predilection for plebeian models and his propensity to represent high subject matters with ordinary figures and accessories. The main goal of this thesis is to offer a new interpretation of Ribera’s naturalism and its interconnections with the picaresque novel, as developed not only in Spain but also in Spanish Naples. My contention is, in fact, that these two aspects of Ribera’s art are not only inextricably connected, but are also specifically rooted in early seventeenth-century Roman and Neapolitan culture and society.

This project explicitly addresses the persistent question of the monochrome. I want to develop several figures of thought such as inscription, erasure and trace in order to examine new ways in which this question might find fresh trajectories of formulation. Historically, the monochrome has attracted discussions related to the autonomy of painting, the circularity of process, chromatic purity, repetition, limits, transcendence, the beyond of representation. The project does not aim to formulate the question of the identity of contemporary abstraction but instead explore the questions related to abstraction’s temporality. The monochrome appears to resist a pure art historical discourse because of the way that it has always been close to a speculative drive within philosophical aesthetics. In this regard I wish to test this relationship between ways of mediating the visual in terms of language and the schemas assumed by the modulation of the ‘seeable’ into the ‘sayable’. Jacques Derrida is an important figure for my research in terms of his thinking about the trace and the play of absence and presence. These concepts will be engaged with alongside accounts of the monochrome in contemporary art history. This intellectual project is anchored by the relationship to my own studio practice, which involves an overlapping of elements that are added and dismantled until a definitive form is achieved. The physical nature of the materials is, thus, central to the activity. Materials are added and removed; the latter process is frequently the more important. The surface is worked through a restrained process of making, trading one factor against another until a resolution becomes possible. By working with increased physicality, plus highly calibrated or austere means, the ambition is then to engage the viewer as a total sentient being as opposed to a receiver of images. The work thus resists the conventions that govern the presentation of image-based paintings and this implies the possibility that the work creates other schemas of both place and temporality.

The aim of this investigation is to consider the extent to which the processes and material stuff of painting remain central to its identity and meaning. Within writing that supports painting, the role played by the medium of paint is too often sidestepped—sidestepped within writings that take as their starting point the interdisciplinary assumption that the message owes little of consequence to the medium through which it becomes disclosed. The retreat from medium specificity, in the 1970s – a move largely made in opposition to the hegemonic force of Greenbergian formalism and the expanded field ushered in by studio practices, as well as an embrace of the text (promoted through theory) – dislocated image from that from which the image is constituted. To a significant extent, particularly in the most vibrant approaches to the medium, the iconographic possibilities of a painting came to be situated in opposition to the characteristics of the painted object. This project addresses how the reduction of painting to linguistic schemas has rendered the material object of painting redundant. The conception of painting as image – free of material baggage and operable through language alone – serves to disguise the temporal nature of the manner by which a painting is constructed. A painting’s surface is built incrementally and, in its stillness, offers clues to what it has been—perhaps the only clues to what it is. I will redress this in two ways. First, through a body of studio practice I will demonstrate the indispensability of spatiotemporal concerns in respect of the processes and object of painting. My painting is reliant on responsiveness to methods of making, and I will foreground the image’s construction, staging it as an imbrication of language and material in time. Secondly, I will engage in a written inquiry comprising of five chapters. In Chapter 1, I attest to my concerns as a painter. Chapter 2 embarks on an investigation into the notion of a medium within the post-medium condition. Chapter 3 will consider the positioning of painting: examining philosophical omissions and historiographical oversights, which have, together, contributed to misunderstandings. Chapter 4 seeks, through the work of Martin Heidegger and Friedrich Hölderlin, to negotiate a new ontological model for the medium of painting, and Chapter 5 re-considers my recent practice – and position on medium – through the lens of the aforementioned inquiry. 4 The context for this work is the realm in which painting’s ontological status is questioned—targeting the nodal point where there is recourse to consider the extent to which the meaning of a painting is dependent on the specificity of its material conditions. To that end, I argue that Heidegger’s notion of truth (and of equipmentality) – developed in “The Origin of the Work of Art” and the Hölderlin Lectures – offers the possibility of replacing the redundancy of the medium with a notion of regeneration, against the backdrop of the endism that haunts painting.

The visual image of the River Thames was central to the identity of London in the long eighteenth century. Art historical engagement with the subject has been dominated by refined upriver views, especially depictions of sites of royal residence and scenes of pageantry. This focus eclipses a significant untapped body of contemporary Thames imagery which suggests the existence of a more complex relationship between the visualisation of London's river and the larger social, ideological and economic contexts of Britain's rapidly developing global maritime and imperial power. This thesis proposes that only by reconnecting these works with the more familiar visual culture of eighteenth-century maritime London, can the full extent to which the river was identified as a signifier of national and imperial consciousness be fully understood. This identification is most apparent in depictions of the commercial and naval activity in the mercantile environs of the port to the east of London Bridge which effectively constitute a visual concordia discors with aggrandised upriver subjects. Thames imagery is also prevalent in the genre of satire where the countercultural nature of the port, characterised via its stereotypical portrayal of a bawdy labour force, undermines the polite pretensions of high art. In topographical views of the capital the dramatic physical rationalisation of the Thames in terms of new bridges and docks was harnessed to raise the profile of London and its river to that of an efficient cosmopolitan port suited for commercial empire. Above all, the image of the Thames evolved into a powerful and widely understood symbol reflecting a patriotic national identity constructed around maritime trade and naval power. This thesis argues for an alternative, more complex image of the Thames in the long eighteenth century which is informed by a range of ideological issues centred around the meaning of commerce and empire from a period when the river became the emblem of London's increasing self-identification as the centre of a maritime nation of unprecedented scale.

This inter-disciplinary thesis addresses the authenticity and social context of surviving portraits of Scottish monarchs between 1530 and c.1590, bringing the study of the Scottish portraits closer to the standard undertaken upon surviving English works. This research focuses upon key questions to begin to reveal the nature of commission and execution of sixteenth-century portraits in Scotland, focusing upon a pair of double portraits from Blair Castle, Pitlochery, Perthshire. The two paintings will form the key case-studies for this research, and the central question to the thesis is whether they are authentic, sixteenth-century Scottish-made images. The thesis will address questions such as: How do they fit into the contemporaneous culture of court portraiture production in Northern Europe and across the border in England? Does the physical evidence support the notion of Netherlandish influence? Surviving documentary evidence of the painterly aspects of the courts of King James V and his grandson King James VI is presented, and the results of interdisciplinary technical analysis used to explore whether the materials and techniques of the Blair portraits and their surviving counterparts demonstrate enough Netherlandish influence to present the existence of a Scoto-Netherlandish school of painting. The National Portrait Gallery’s research project Making Art in Tudor Britain (2007-2014) 2010 conference Tudor and Jacobean Painting: Production, Influences and Patronage raised the issue of the need for a parallel project for Scotland, tracing the highly-developed use of portraiture by the later Stewart dynasty to its fifteenth-century Scottish beginnings. This thesis argues that far from being culturally backwards in terms of portraiture, the Scottish court employed fashionable Netherlandish techniques from an early date, with a strong understanding of the impact of the arts dating from the earliest Stewarts. Most importantly, this research is the first to undertake a full technical examination of the Blair Castle portraits, placing these works within a comprehensive material context. Such examination of the visual arts commissioned at this time can only further our understanding of the wider context of production in Scotland at this time. Additionally, understanding the nature of the commission of royal portraits by those in noble families makes clearer the use of the visual arts to enhance careers and reputation, as well as social identity. In focusing the discussion purely upon Scottish portraits in native collections, this research unites works which have not been comprehensively studied as a whole. The study of the sixteenth-century Scottish court has advanced considerably in recent years, but without an in-depth examination of the artworks produced as visual representation of these courts, a complete understanding cannot be achieved. This thesis demonstrates that much of the production of royal portraits was based upon the copying of copies. It is thus not the aesthetic quality which should be the focus, but the circumstances of their existence and material composition which is most revealing about the place Scotland holds within the study of early modern European art.

Typescript (photocopy). / Digitized by Kansas Correctional Industries

In the course of studying painting for the past three years at the University of Iowa, I have found collaborating with other artists to be a great way for me to try on different hats. Two of these collaborations in particular, The Old Man Study Group with Hamlett Dobbins (Memphis, TN) and The Coracle Drawing Club with David Dunlap (Iowa City, IA), have given me the license and opportunity to pretend to be someone else. These collaborative projects have asked me to consider, and at times adopt, even if only for a moment, the interests and concerns of another maker. A few months into these two projects, I noticed that the work I was making on my own, in the isolation of my own studio, was suddenly open to the world's innovations, and not just my own.