This thesis is an ethnographic study of theatre audiences and the ways in which they experience community. It is positioned within current debates on the mediatization and globalization of society, and the ongoing discussion as to whether social change has an adverse effect on community experience. Methodologically it emphasizes the investigation of audience contexts and collaborative practices among actors and theatregoers and between researcher and respondents. Audiences’ own terminology is considered vital to understanding what community means to them. The thesis examines community experience across the whole trajectory of the theatregoing event, from theatregoers’ backgrounds, through interactions at theatre performances, to discussion outside the auditorium and in their everyday lives. It argues that while theatre audiences conform to the perception that they tend to be middle aged and predominantly female, there are modifications to Bourdieu’s findings that cultural consumption is closely related to social class gradations. In particular, mainstream theatregoers extend across the spectrum of the middle class and their tastes in theatre are eclectic. Similarly, the research finds that there are other ways than through habitus that theatregoers acquire cultural tastes and practices. A close consideration of interactions at theatre performances, and the physical contexts in which they take place, identifies features of interaction and auditoria that encourage or discourage community, and relates them to interaction in everyday life. An investigation of why theatregoers prefer live to mediatized performance, and an examination of changes in audience perception and how much they are shared with others, contribute to an assessment of the transformative power of theatre and of how far face-to-face community is perennial in society.

This thesis analyses the changes in visual artists' living and working conditions and the ways in which visual artists reacted to these changes after German unification. It has sought to explore aspects of the interface between the state, the individual visual artists and the visual artists' community in a society of transformation and comments on the impact of change on the existence of such a relationship. The aims are twofold. First, to contribute to an understanding of visual artists' reactions to the dynamics of change created by changes of their working and living conditions after German unification. A second aim was to analyse the causes of the behaviour of the group of older visual artists. This study of change employed an interdisciplinary approach and combined sociology, psychology, history and cultural policy studies in order to analyse visual artists' responses to the challenge of German unification. Exploration of these themes has been informed by a qualitative empirical study of how visual artists respond to change in the East German region of Saxony. A theoretical framework was developed using grounded theory, which was used to code the following datasets: interviews with 30 visual artists, 10 administrators and 3 group discussions. The theoretical perspective adopted drew on organisational change theory, on sociology of culture and on socialisation theory. In this way it contributes to the relocation of visual artists as key actors in cultural policy research. The results of the research revealed that initial expectations of the swift adaptation of visual artists' to the new living and working conditions were not fulfilled and that visual artists moved between adaptation and resistance. Although the administrative transformation of the state was completed by 1998, the process of change is ongoing for the visual artists. Unification left the visual artists in a state of shock, a state they have been recovering from since 1990. The findings lead to development of the Visual Artists Adaptation Model, which as a unique approach combines the collective cultural shock model and human change role model with the responses of visual artists to German unification. It analyses the process of change experienced by visual artists in five stages (1. euphoria, 2. shock and disconfirmation, 3 adaptation, 4. stabilisation, 5. normalisation). In an ideal case scenario, the result of adaptation should be a career re-start, which can be achieved once visual artists manage to overcome cultural shock. I argue that adaptation is delayed when learning anxiety conflicts with survival anxiety and when a psychologically safe situation fails to be provided. This proved to be the case for the group of older visual artists. It is concluded that values, developed as part of a socialist socialisation, acted as key obstacles to adaptation to the capitalist system. These values and norms evolved in different ways over years due to successful indoctrination with Marxist-Leninist ideology.

Two main arguments are developed in this thesis: first is the claim that our ability to make and understand representational pictures has a natural basis in our capacity to see. In this respect, I have drawn on the ideas of the visual scientist, David Marr and on the theory of representation expounded by John Willats. Second, I argue that the view articulated by these theorists forms a theoretical backdrop for, but does not satisfactorily explain, how pictures may heighten our sense of bodily presence. A central aim of this thesis is therefore to show how this mode of expression is also non-arbitrarily linked to the process of seeing by virtue of its relationship with our visuomotor capacities. In order to give substance to these ideas, I have attempted to weave together knowledge of art history with neuropsychological evidence and phenomenological philosophy. In applying this view to the work of particular artists, I have largely focussed on the oeuvre of Cézanne and the Cubists. However, the general form of this argument is intended to have wider implications, indicating the development of a stylistic tendency in modern art and showing how it differs from that of the Renaissance tradition. In conclusion, my thesis expresses the view that vision – and hence representation – can be divided along two separate lines: one related to a conceptual form of seeing and the other related to a bodily form of perception. The "crisis of representation" in the late nineteenth century is therefore considered indicative of a rejection of the former mode of visuality. Instead, modern artists are said to re-structure the viewing experience so that it shows the reliance of sight on the body, thus permitting the beholder a more active and constitutive role in the perception of art.

St Nicholas was one of the most popular saints in medieval Italy. His cult attracted the attention of popes, kings and emperors, and his shrine at Bari became an important international pilgrimage destination. This thesis asks how the cult of St Nicholas came to be so widespread and popular in Italy, and why the saint attracted the attention of diverse groups and individuals. This thesis is structured around four chapters. The first demonstrates that through a process of Latinisation the cult of St Nicholas became integrated within Italian literary traditions and within a new spiritual era. Chapter Two reveals that this Latinisation also occurred within the saint’s iconography. Chapters Three and Four are case studies of the cult in Puglia and Venice, locations which claimed possession of the saint’s relics. These case studies show that the general developments that the cult of St Nicholas underwent in Italy, identified in Chapters One and Two, did not apply universally. Instead, the presence of the saint’s relics resulted in a different profile of the saint in Bari and Venice. Through the process of Latinisation, the cult of St Nicholas became updated and remained relevant for its new Italian audience; Chapters Three and Four show alternative ways that the cult of St Nicholas gained widespread popularity. This thesis presents for the first time an iconographical study of St Nicholas in Italian art, which develops existing research of the saint’s Byzantine iconography. Chapter Four presents a profile of the cult of St Nicholas in Venice in the Middle Ages, which is a significant oversight in the literature. The thesis uses a variety of visual and textual sources, in particular fresco and altarpiece representations, archival documents from Venice and Rome (including the Apostolic Visitations), and under-exploited contemporary and antiquarian Venetian sources.

The Italian iconography of the doctor saints Cosmas and Damian reflects fluctuations in the fortunes of the cult of those saints with significant variations in appearance and meaning being tied to changes in the position of the saints with respect to function, as miraculous healers, as representatives of professional doctors and as patrons of a powerful family. This study considers the development of the iconography of the doctor saints Cosmas and Damian in Italy, beginning with the emergence of images in the late antique period. These early representations are explored within the context of the historic and liturgical origins of the cult of SS. Cosmas and Damian with particular attention paid to the hagiography and more specfically the miracle stories which provide a significant amount of information about the role of images in a Christian healing cult. Evidence that sheds light on the early development of the iconography of the saints reflecting their position within the broader context of the establishment of Christian healers in direct opposition to their popular pagan counterparts. In the fourteenth century the appearance of SS. Cosmas and Damian was transformed mirroring the appearance of contemporary doctors, which in turn reflected the professionalisation of medicine and the role of the saints as patrons to members of that profession. This iconographic development is considered in the context of sources such as university statutes and civic sumptuary regulations that helped to shape the environment of increasing specialization that resulted in the necessity of a distinctive costume for qualified professionals. At the same time there remained continuity in the position SS. Cosmas and Damian inhabited in the popular imagination with images of the saints continuing to be associated with their traditional role as miraculous healers. Finally the large number of images commissioned by Cosimo de’ Medici in Florence in the first half of the fifteenth century are examined. At this time the position of the saints, as intercessors for and protectors of the Medici family allowed them to appear in unfamiliar locations granting them a civic and political relevance not achieved before in the history of the cult. The clear identification of the saints with the family allowed them to act as a reminder of the family’s position in Florence and for a time the doctors were known as family patrons rather than solely as doctors and healers.

This thesis analyses eighteenth-century portraiture within the context of 'norms' propagated in contemporary prescriptive and fictional literature, 'norms' which overlay a heterogeneous reality. The aspirant portraitist had to accord with the desire of sitters to be depicted in a manner that would receive approbation. Thus, disparate relationships were pictorially subsumed within affectionate ideals that burgeoned in the mid eighteenth century, stimulated by the cult of sensibility and disseminated through an expanding body of literature to an expanding readership. However, these did not displace more 'traditional' concerns, but appeared alongside continuing pictorial emphases on patriarchy, hierarchy and dynastic continuity. The introduction outlines the historiography and methodology and provides a detailed summary of each chapter. Chapter one examines the emergence of the companionate marital portrait, together with pictorial condemnations of arranged and romantic unions. Chapter two argues that this new emphasis on affection did not displace patriarchy. Pendants continued to demarcate masculine and feminine domains whilst double portraits emphasised those domains as complementary, but unequal. Chapter three discusses the pictorial and literary sentimentalisation of motherhood and argues that condemnations of female display were acknowledged in portraits of engrossed and self-effacing mothers. Chapter four counters that the sentimentalisation of the patriarch was limited by a continuing preoccupation with his pre-eminence and that later images of playful children maintained earlier concerns with age and gender hierarchies and 'futurity'. Chapter five argues that both an emphasis on heirs and anxiety over the implications of high infant mortality for dynastic succession remained constant. The contextualisation of portraits within the home also reveals an emphasis on unbroken lineage. Chapter six examines satires of transgressions of ideal familial relations by members of a supposedly debauched aristocracy. However, these aristocrats sometimes countered such attacks with portraits emphasising status and domestic virtue. The conclusion summarises the arguments and discusses their implications for debates over class.

In my doctorate, I have sought to question the establishment of the Academy in France along two particular lines of enquiry. I considered why the government established a state institution for the arts and how and why it sought to influence artistic production. Under Richelieu, artistic initiatives were subordinated to the requirements of factional court politics. But after the upheavals of the Fronde (1648-53), the monarchy created the Absolutist court in which aesthetics were politics. In the phrase used by the logicians of Port-Royal: Le portrait du Cesar, c'est Cesar". The increased political importance of the image coincided with a radical re-evaluation of sight and its representation in the visual image, following the work of Descartes. I therefore set out to analyse the debates in and around the Academy concerning theories of vision and their implication for the artist. I found the Academy resisted Cartesian and perspectival theory and expelled its first Professor of Perspective, Abraham Bosse, in a dispute which sheds much light on its institutional and theoretical base. Far from being an easy Academic victory, the dispute required the intervention of Colbert himself. Insteadof the Desarguian perspective championed by Bosse, the Academy's theorist, Gregoire Huret sought to control the pictorial sign through gender difference. But his theory contained too many prohibitions to be of practical use to artists. It was not until the Academy was pushed by the government into accepting the Modern theories of Roger de Piles that a gap opened between nature and its representation in which artists could operate. These two histories were closely linked, for it was not until the Academy found a means of representing its theory in the work of Watteau and the fête galante artists, that it achieved institutional security. The final chapter of my thesis analyses Watteau's work as a resolution of the long-standing theoretical uncertainty in the Academy over the status of the visual image. In an epilogue, the rapid death of the fete galante as a genre is shown to mark the end of this chapter of Academic history. In elucidating the often complex artistic theories in early modern France, I have made use of the methodology and theory of contemporary French thinkers such as Louis Mann, Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. Their insights have helped me appreciate the complexity and vitality of Academic thought which has so often been readily dismissed as sterile scholasticism. The painters of the Academy were also theorists. In that sense, we have much to learn from them.

Religious life in the later middle ages was increasingly dominated by the mendicant Orders, notably the Franciscans. Their dominance also extended to the artistic life of the day. The initial artistic campaigns of the Franciscans centred on the native province of the founder, most notably in the Upper and Lower churches of S. Francesco in Assisi. With the expansion of the Order and the death and canonization of the second Franciscan saint, Anthony of Padua, his adopted province, the Veneto, became an important centre for theological and artistic activity. The Basilica del Santo, built to enshrine the new saint's relics, rivalled the mother church at Assisi in both scale and lavishness of decoration. The fourteenth century in particular was marked by a succession of decorative programmes, a large part of which has survived. Soon the other Franciscan churches in the Veneto were similarly patronized. Unlike Umbria and Tuscany, areas where Franciscan churches are ridden with problems of dating and attribution, the Order' churches in the Veneto are probably the best documented of Italy. They provided a unique opportunity to set up a control of Franciscan patronage of the arts during the later middle ages. This thesis touches on all types of Franciscan patronage: conventual, and lay, communal and ecclesiastical. This research relied on a newly published Franciscan archive of over 27,000 documents, and is the first extensive survey of its kind for the Franciscan Order. It is hoped that this contribution has filled some gaps in our knowledge of artistic patronage. Firstly it has thrown light on the role played by the Order of friars minor in artistic projects, from the initial planning stages to the commissioning, execution and supervision of works. It has been shown that Franciscans were not always involved in artistic projects; at times they cooperated with individuals, or families, and at other times they played no part at all. Whether actively involved or more inactive, the friars were open to all sorts of artistic experiments, which means that the Franciscan church was an ideal environment for creativity.

This thesis concerns drawing as a form of enquiry, figuration and knowledge, specifically relating to perceptions of the body and embodied experience. The primary method and object of research is the practice of direct mark-making in response to perceptual experience, here termed observational drawing. The skills and habits of this learnt practice have been destabilised: by attempting a phenomenological approach; by drawing faces and bodies in conditions of movement and change; by progressively subtracting elements of manual and visual control. Following from observational drawing, the creative research methodology incorporates other modes of drawing, re-working of scanned drawings, note-making, reading and writing. The thesis includes a written overview (Part I), and a digital archive of drawings (Part II), jointly comprising a narrative of the research process. The study starts by considering drawing as a cognitive process; as a means of understanding corporeality; and as constitutive of embodied knowledge. Through drawing, issues are raised regarding the contingencies and contexts of my own observational practice, and the histories that inhabit it. A retrospective investigation through reading and writing has produced twelve texts, interconnected to become one website/diagram (Part III). This research contributes to the growing recognition of art practice as enquiry. Part III of the thesis locates the manual/visual operations of drawing, and the rhetoric of the hand, eye and mind used to describe them, within an epistemological and historical context. This is done from the specific perspective of the creative practitioner. Reference is made to philosophical, art historical and feminist texts; to delineations of the animal and critiques of anthropocentric accounts of knowledge. The conclusion identifies paradoxes within my practice, and oscillations in modes of looking, that characterise its knowledge-making operations. It is suggested such provisionality enables a multiplicity of figurative outcomes that can contribute to understandings of corporeal experience.

The focus of this study is a community arts programme, Art in Mind, which is based in an inner-city area of an East Midlands city in the UK and was funded by the government's New Deal for the Communities. The aim of the qualitative research study was to gain understanding of the human processes involved in setting up such a project and to ascertain the subsequent benefits to participants. The research was conducted in two stages: stage one involved semi-structured interviews with seven of the original Art in Mind Steering Group members and stage two comprised interviews with eleven participants who were interviewed up to three times over a one-year period. Sixteen people were interviewed in total. The findings from participants are presented as a case-series. Interviewees included those who subsequently became members of the 'Lost Artists Club', one of the community-based activities that originated within the project and those who engaged with an 'Arts on Prescription' programme. In both stages, a total of 35 qualitative interviews were conducted. The concept of mental health promotion through the arts is examined in the context of national developments to promote social inclusion. The methodological framework for the research is a narrative inquiry and emphasis is given to the stories that are individually and collectively constructed and recounted by the participants. All the data were subject to a narrative analysis, incorporating thematic, event and relational analysis. Individual and collective narratives are presented. Findings from stage one of the research identify the personal motivations of Steering Group members to develop the programme. Findings from stage two of the research reveal that the project facilitated new personal, social and occupational opportunities for participants. Identity claims are strong, as people have re-constructed themselves as artists. Participants enjoy a sense of belonging and social identity with like-minded people.