Abstract {\clqq}Images of Friends`` Contemporary portrait paintings in the works of European women artists Collection of works inspired by relationships and people The graduation thesis is divided into two main parts. The first one deals with the contemporary portrait paintings of European women artists; the second one concerns the ideological and technical aspect of their work. In the theoretical part of the thesis I am concerned with the diverse conceptions of portrait painting of the European women artists from the 2nd half of the 19th century until now. I have highlighted the factors which define the changes in topicality and character of the portrait painting of the artists. Within this context I have traced the influence of emancipation of the artists on their work, the influence of the visual media on the portrait genre itself, the diverse conceptions of portrait painting arising from respect to traditions of the genre or diversion from the traditions. The text also contains self-reflective parts connected to the work itself and supplementary material concerning the technical side of the work. The practical part of my thesis comprises documentation of a collection of twelve portraits.

Thesis (M.A.)--Florida State University, 2006. / Advisor: James J. Bloom, Florida State University, College of Visual Arts, Theatre and Dance, Dept. of Art History. Title and description from dissertation home page (viewed Sept. 26, 2006). Document formatted into pages; contains viii, 79 pages. Includes bibliographical references.

This thesis examines the portraiture of Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun and Adélaide Labille-Guiard within the context of their time. Analysis of specific portraits in American collections is provided, along with an examination of their careers: early education, Academic Royale membership, Salon exhibitions, and the French Revolution. Discussion includes the artists' opposing stylistic heritages, as well as the influences of their patronage, the French art academy and art criticism. This study finds that Salon critics compared their paintings, but not with the intention of creating a bitter personal and professional rivalry between them as presumed by some twentieth-century art historians. This thesis concludes those critics simply addressed their opposing artistic styles and that no such rivalry existed.

This dissertation examines paintings by the Florentine artist Agnolo Bronzino, and by his teacher, Jacopo Pontormo. It takes as its focus works created during the period of 1529-39, a decade of political uncertainty and social unrest predating Bronzino's career as court painter. The study begins during the brutal Siege of Florence in 1529-30, which brought an end to the last Florentine republic. Although the republic's defeat made way for the establishment of the Medici duchy, the 1530s were marked by fervent and unrelenting republican opposition to the new dukes. These circumstances provide the background to this study, in which paintings by Bronzino and Pontormo are shown to offer eloquent--if sometimes cautious--comment on recent political events. The initial chapters address the relationship between two paintings carried out during the Siege, reconciling Pontormo's Portrait of a Halberdier (Francesco Guardi) with its allegorical cover, Bronzino's Pygmalion and Galatea. The first chapter reconsiders the role of Venus in Bronzino's painting, attributing to her a rousing, rather than pacifying, influence; she is shown to be a deity especially well-suited for reverence by young Florentine soldiers, and a fitting subject for the cover of Pontormo's republican portrait. The second chapter explores the specific political significance of Bronzino's artistic choices, paying special attention to his allusion to Michelangelo's marble David, whose form he incorporates into the figure of Pygmalion's beloved Galatea. The young hero David--shown to be one of the period's most potent republican symbols--is somehow manifest in each of the paintings considered, linking the four chapters. But whereas the Pygmalion and Galatea and Portrait of a Halberdier are explained as republican pictures created under republican rule, the portraits examined in the third and fourth chapters are presented as subversive images created under the Medici dukes. The third chapter reinterprets Bronzino's Portrait of Ugolino Martelli (c. 1537), as an expression of republican opposition to ducal rule. The fourth chapter proposes a new dating for Pontormo's Portrait of Carlo Neroni--presently understood as a republican picture dating to the period of the Siege--relocating its origin to c. 1538-9, well after the republic's defeat. This reassessment has important implications for a number of portraits by both artists, and it calls into question currently accepted art-historical approaches to Florentine culture in the 1530s. By identifying examples of republican factionalism in portraits painted by Pontormo and Bronzino under Medici rule, this dissertation discovers political dissent where previously considered impossible.

This dissertation offers a new interpretation of Anthony van Dyck’s art and career, taking as its point of departure a body of contemporary anecdotes, poems, and art theoretical texts that all responded to Van Dyck’s portrait sittings. It makes a decisive break with previous scholarship that explained Van Dyck’s focus on portraiture in terms of an intellectual deficit or a pathological fixation on status. Instead, I argue that throughout his career, Van Dyck consciously made the interaction between painter and sitter a central theme of his art. Offering an alternate account of Van Dyck’s relationship to Rubens as a young painter, the opening chapter examines Van Dyck’s initial decision to place portraiture at the heart of his production. I trace that decision to Van Dyck’s work on a series of history paintings that depict the binding of St. Sebastian, interpreted here as a programmatic statement on the part of a young artist with a deep commitment to life study and little interest in an emerging hierarchy of genres that deprecated portraiture. The second chapter surveys the portrait copies of both Rubens and Van Dyck, demonstrating that imitative and historicist investigations link their approaches to portraiture. Van Dyck drew upon his copies of Titian and Raphael in paintings such as his epochal portrait of Cardinal Guido Bentivoglio, which awakened an ambivalent response on the part of Italian artists and critics. But Van Dyck’s practice of imitation also extended to his comportment and self-presentation in public, as exemplified by his emulation of Sofonisba Anguissola. A discussion of Van Dyck’s encounter with Anguissola leads to the contention that Van Dyck saw himself as participating in an alternate genealogy of art that placed court portraiture at the heart of an ambitious career and offered a rare opening to female practitioners. Van Dyck’s reception by one such painter, the English portraitist Mary Beale, provides a Leitmotiv throughout the dissertation. The third chapter situates Rubens’s and Van Dyck’s contrasting approaches to female portraiture within a larger shift in the status of portraits of women in the early seventeenth century, as embodied by the pan-European phenomenon of the “Gallery of Beauties.” This chapter also offers readings of the two artists’ contrasting depictions of Maria de’ Medici, who visited both of their homes during her exile in the Southern Netherlands. Such visits to Van Dyck’s studio provide the subject of the fourth and final chapter, which reexamines early biographers’ accounts of Van Dyck’s sittings and surveys his legacy for English painting and art theory over the course of the long seventeenth century. Whereas in their own writings, artists emphasized the opportunities for courtly self-assertion afforded by the sitting, poets and playwrights were more likely to depict sittings as threats to the sexual and moral order. Both attitudes represent important aspects of Van Dyck’s critical reception. The conclusion looks ahead to the tenacious hold of the portrait sitting on modern imaginings of the studio. Examining the portrait practices of such artists as Lucian Freud, Andy Warhol, and Alice Neel, the conclusion reveals the persistence of a fascination with the sitting that had its origin with Van Dyck.

The entire thesis text is included in the research.pdf file; the official abstract appears in the short.pdf file; a non-technical public abstract appears in the public.pdf file. Title from PDF of title page (University of Missouri--Columbia, viewed on March 19, 2010). Thesis advisor: Dr. Michael Yonan. Art work removed from thesis by author. Includes bibliographical references.

Renaissance art historians concur that women were characteristically depicted as ideal types in Renaissance portraiture. Nonetheless, the historiography of portraits of women in Renaissance Italy reveals generational shifts between scholars. Male scholars writing in the nineteenth-century to the mid twentieth-century applied formalist and cultural historical methodologies. Recent scholars raise issues that were previously neglected, such as social historical and feminist concerns. Following this rationale, I argue that the changing interests of scholars have altered the interpretations of portraits of Renaissance women. Moreover, this historical difference is split along gender lines in the historiography of Titian's La Bella. A critical review of the literature on this painting shows that male scholars, such as John Pope-Hennessey, Harold E. Wethey, and Charles Hope define the work in formal terms, such as "charming" and "pretty," whereas female scholars such as Elizabeth Cropper, Patricia Simons and Rona Goffen concur the work to be a synecdoche for the beauty of painting itself. A historiography of Titian as a portrait painter confirms that recent scholars have shifted focus from formal studies to an assessment of the social context, conditions of patronage and the feminist issues surrounding the artist's portraits.

The thesis focuses on four sets of official portraits of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, which were painted by the German-born elite portrait specialist Franz Xaver Winterhalter (1805-1873) between 1842 and 1859. These portraits are examined in detail and are placed within the contexts of the existing scholarship on Franz Xaver Winterhalter, British portrait painting of the 1830s and 1840s, and the patronage of portraiture in Britain during the reigns of William IV and Queen Victoria. The thesis compares and contrasts these works with official representations of Queen Victoria and her husband by British artists; and examines the concept of “gender reversal” within the accepted notion of marital pendants by highlighting Winterhalter’s innovations in the genre of official portraiture.The thesis challenges the perception that Winterhalter’s employment at the court of Queen Victoria was due to the Queen’s alleged penchant for “all things German” by placing Winterhalter’s portraits within the context of the British Royal Collection. It examines the reasons for the artist’s success at the British court, accentuating among others Winterhalter’s ability to conceptualise in his portraits of Prince Albert the hierarchically-complex position of the Prince Consort. The overarching arguments of the thesis focus on two propositions - that by employing a foreign artist as her official image maker, Queen Victoria acquired ultimate control over the production, distribution and popularisation of her own imagery; and that this patronage is illustrative of the emergence of a royal and aristocratic international iconography that overrode the competing concept of ‘national’ schools of art.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Montana, 2008. / Title from title screen. Description based on contents viewed Aug. 25, 2008. Includes bibliographical references (p. 46-49).

Thesis (M.A.) - Carleton University, 2007. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 136-141). Also available in electronic format on the Internet.