With reference to her poetry, prose, and visual arts from the 1910s to the 1950s, this dissertation considers Mina Loy’s representation of grotesque bodies within the context of the theory and artistic practice of early twentieth century avant-garde movements, particularly those most influential to her—Futurism, Dada, and Surrealism. With a focus on Loy’s representation of bodily processes, functions, or excretions and the unstable boundaries of aberrant bodies (e.g., women’s bodies, deformed or disabled bodies, dead bodies), the present work argues that Loy’s deployment of the grotesque constitutes a strategy in negotiating a place between traditional and avant-garde cultures, or what Susan Suleiman calls the “double margin.” On the one hand, Loy’s grotesque bodies challenge the Victorian sanitized bodily ideal opposed to the unrestrained female or savage body. Yet they also parody the tendency of Futurist, Dadaist, and Surrealist art to reinforce the perception of woman as Other to a stable, male norm by gendering female the uncanny, abject, irrational, primitive, and deviant. Unlike a majority of her male counterparts, Loy intimates identification with the grotesque body. In addition to articulating her sense of difference, the grotesque body, with its precarious borders and mutability, often serves in Loy’s work as concrete manifestation of a confusion and interpenetration of categories presumed distinct. Since they undermine the symbolic scaffolding of Western patriarchal culture, these “conceptual” grotesques, or slippages between categories (e.g., self and other, domestic and public, the cerebral and carnal), have a powerful subversive potential. / A Dissertation submitted to the Program of Interdisciplinary Humanities in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Fall Semester 2017. / November 8, 2017. / Avant-garde, Dada, Futurism, Grotesque, Mina Loy, Surrealism / Includes bibliographical references. / Joann Gardner, Professor Directing Dissertation; Lisa Wakamiya, University Representative; Andrew Epstein, Committee Member; Martin Kavka, Committee Member.

Uppsatsen är historiografisk och undersöker hur konststilen Den nya sakligheten beskrivits och värderats i Sverige vid skilda tidpunkter från dess uppkomst 1919 och framåt. Här beskrivs också den svenska stilen jämfört med dess internationella motsvarigheter. Vidare analysas hur såväl kontextuella som andra orsaker påverkat de skiftande omdömen som lämnats. Resonemang förs även om stilens placering i svensk konstkanon samt dess förhållande till modernismen i stort. Till grund för undersökningen ligger ett stort antal tidningsrecensioner från utställningar samt studier av olika tiders konsthistorieverk. Även orsaker till varför stilen under vissa tider mer eller mindre ignorerats analyseras.

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The thesis advances the name of Raphael Santi, the High Renaissance artist, to be included among the famous and highly esteemed Humanists of the Renaissance period. While the artistic creativity of the Renaissance is widely recognized, the creators have traditionally been viewed as mere craftsmen. In the case of Raphael Santi, his skills as a painter have proven to be a timeless medium for the immortalizing of the elevated thinking and turbulent challenges of the time period. His interests outside of painting, including archaeology and architecture, also offer strong testimony of his Humanist background and pursuits.

This dissertation investigates art and architecture surrounding the early modern outbreak of what is commonly understood to be syphilis, focusing predominantly on the Italian peninsula and Sicily. Adopting the early modern term mal francese, I consider the processes through which contemporary notions of health and healing reconciled the identification and management of a novel contagion during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. More specifically, prioritizing historical perspectives of disease and intersecting socioeconomic factors, the cross-disciplinary approach of my dissertation demonstrates the cultural impact of the mal francese outbreak through art and architecture that framed the emerging contagion as a chronic infirmity.Primary accounts or literature, together with art, architecture, and urban space yield crucial insights for understanding how past cultures reconciled health crises. Despite its conspicuous symptoms and prevalence during the early modern period, mal francese has received markedly less attention in art historical scholarship compared to plague or leprosy. My dissertation takes advantage of this lacuna in the scholarship in order to examine how the epidemic outbreak was encountered and interpreted. The framework of my dissertation responds to intellectual traditions in the history of science and medicine, relying on early modern concepts of infirmity to analyze the art and architecture of mal francese in the ambit of the Ospedale degli Incurabili network. My Introduction (Chapter 1) examines the emergence of mal francese from the perspective of early modern medical theory. In addition to a review of scholarship, I establish context for studying representations of infirmity and healing, and charitable healthcare reform during the period. Chapter 2 investigates representations of mal francese across media during the long sixteenth century. My discussion considers diverse examples based on descriptive primary accounts of evolving symptoms to discern how the visual arts registered combined social and medical perceptions of the infirmity. I assert that these collective works disclosed recognition about the nature of mal francese as a chronic infirmity, which disproportionately impacted vulnerable members of society despite the realities of its indiscriminate transmission. In Chapter 3, I elucidate the implementation of medical care for mal francese though visual and material culture. Although deemed incurable, contemporary medical practice held that symptoms of mal francese could at least be managed in individuals. In this chapter, I examine art that supported adaptions in traditional therapeutic interventions and the introduction of novel remedies for the contagion. Chapter 4 draws a connecting thread through the dissertation regarding the broader impact of the outbreak on public health measures. I consider parallel developments in healing environments for mal francese relative to ongoing reforms for institutional models of charitable assistance. In particular, I discuss the form and function of the Ospedali degli Incurabili branches in Venice (1522), Naples (1519), and Palermo (1533). The demographic features and dynamics of those centers, as port cities, presented unique challenges for public health and welfare following the mal francese outbreak. Despite compelling links, and contrasts, my study is the first to examine the healing environments of these Incurabili hospital branches together. Founded during the sixteenth century, I examine how the hospitals ensured long term shelter and specialized care for the sick poor afflicted with mal francese. The dissertation then concludes with a brief Coda to synthesize key observations about the impact of mal francese in early modern art and architecture. This dissertation contributes to the field in three main ways. First, I demonstrate that representations of mal francese were highly context-dependent due to formal and iconographic affinities to other infirmities, and with respect to contexts of production and reception. The emphasis on depicted signs or symptoms shifted to convey visual information while providing reassurance, creating distance, or identifying those at the center of a health and welfare crisis as symbols of charitable assistance and subjects of medical care. Second, healing imagery associated with the infirmity didn’t depict mal francese patients recovering from illness, but rather focused on the means for managing its symptoms. In particular, the introduction of guaiacum as a foreign specific used to treat mal francese prompted inventive representational strategies to frame the remedy as a medical innovation and miraculous cure. Finally, access to that therapeutic regimen varied with respect to the medical marketplace, due to issues of cost and functional space. However, new charitable institutions began to facilitate treatment for the growing numbers of sick poor. The Ospedali degli Incurabili were the greatest consumers of guaiacum in the Italian peninsula and Sicily. Each of the branches I discuss developed to support greater accommodations for a growing patient population, facilities that offered specialized treatment for mal francese, and urban renovations guided by contemporary public health goals. This reflected a continuation of earlier models in healthcare reform towards greater medicalization and capacity, but the trend appeared to hasten in these centers following the foundation of the Ospedali degli Incurabili. / Art History

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