Browsing by Author "Wolfthal, Diane"

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    Complicating Medieval Anti-Semitism: The Role of Class in Two Tales of Christian Violence against Jews
    (The University of Chicago Press, 2016) Wolfthal, Diane
    Miri Rubin justly concluded that “most remaining traces” of medieval atrocities against Jews “represent the position of Christian authorities—chroniclers, preachers, town officials—who were almost always writing in defence or celebration of the events.” The exceptions to this rule, however, are illuminating. This article explores images produced for Christians that condemn Christian acts of violence against Jews. Although these are few in number, their existence complicates our understanding of medieval anti-Semitism. The first part of the essay investigates an episode in a fourteenth-century French chronicle, the pillage of the Jews of Paris in 1380. The second part examines depictions of the fable of the murdered Jew, which date from the late thirteenth through the fifteenth century. Both narratives—one drawn from a historical event, the other grafted onto an ancient fable—portray the Jew as the innocent victim and the Christian as the treacherous assailant. In so doing, they reverse the better-known paradigm of the Jew as the evil aggressor who attacks innocent Christian boys or the consecrated host. This essay considers the circumstances that enabled some Christians to view with sympathy the figure of a vulnerable, attacked Jew and proposes that sometimes class interests trumped religious prejudice.
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    Demons as a Cultural Species in Fifteenth-Century Northern European Art
    (2020-04-24) Seale, Layla; Wolfthal, Diane
    In the later European middle ages, demons were a constant and pervasive presence. They appear in illuminations, paintings, prints, sculpture, songs, literature, and liturgy. Demons are represented as irreverent, beastly, murderous, sexually aggressive, miserable, or gleeful diabolical figures that evoke fear, revulsion, laughter, meditation, atonement, or pity. Their only constant is their mutability. I argue the visual complexity of these representations evoke multivalent interpretations and thus demands closer examinations. The unique forms and inventive iconographic contexts for demon imagery in late medieval and early modern art reveal alternative modes of viewing the infernal non-human. My dissertation is the first art historical study exploring demons–beings at the core of Christianity–as a type of species with complex bodies, behaviors, and sexualities. In particular, I examine miniatures in richly illuminated manuscripts–hand-held texts that invited close looking and intense contemplation for the late medieval devotee. I focus on devils that appear in luxury objects designed for noble or wealthy patrons in order to analyze how these liminal beings embody the concerns of elite institutions and viewers. Specifically, those produced within the shifting milieus of fifteenth-century France, Burgundy, and the Netherlands reflect distinct socio-political fears. Demons indicate not only how dominant cultures define and visualize evil, but also whom they decide to literally and figuratively demonize. Overall, this project fuses and expands medieval and early modern disciplinary and theoretical boundaries. My arguments synthesize visual analysis and historical context with literature, monster theory, animal studies, critical race theory, posthumanism, Marxism, and feminism. I examine images of demons as intricate portrayals of a distinct category of beings – a cultural species– with jobs, genders, emotions, and procreative abilities that reveal structural anxieties regarding race, labor, gender, and sexual violence.
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    Muslim, Sub-Saharan African, and Native American Bodies as European Furnishings, 1500–1700
    (2024-08-05) Kim, Dasol; Wolfthal, Diane
    My doctoral dissertation investigates the European production and reception of metalwork depicting the Other from the Christian European perspective. I study bronze statuettes, swords, and silver cups made in German-speaking regions and Italy between 1500 and 1700, with a focus on their use in the Holy Roman Empire. These small metal furnishings reflected and constructed the Christian European elites’ conception of depicted groups by being seen, touched, and smelled at courts, city halls, and burgher houses. Chapter one reveals the humanist lens of the Ottoman Empire behind the classical format and placement of bronze Turks in a German residence. Chapter two studies candlesticks and lamps depicting Muslims and Africans grafted onto vegetal and architectural motifs. The moving flame and smoke animated such grotesques that allude to the Otherness. Chapter three discusses how princes and patricians promoted their masculine identities and war propaganda by displaying and wearing swords in the shape of Muslims or Africans. Chapter four studies a rare wager cup incorporating the image of a bearded man wearing a kaftan, a Hungarian or Turkish soldier, into that of a fashionable Italian woman wearing a narrow bodice and a conical skirt. Because its image transgresses gender and ethnicity, the cup offers a nuanced case study of Renaissance Otherness. Chapter five studies wine vessels supported by sculptures of Native American or Afro-American men. Precious metals and edible ingredients like sugar and tropical fruit informed the iconography of these cups. Portable and in proximity, small utensils shaped Renaissance European understanding of the religious and ethnic Other in their everyday lives. My doctoral dissertation bridges the gap between European decorative arts studies and the study of the image of Otherness in European art by shedding light on understudied small metalwork. I adopt sensory studies, performance studies, gender studies, and the issue of class and labor, the methods rarely employed to understand the image of Muslims, Africans, and Native Americans in European decorative arts.
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    Revealing and Concealing: Interactive Objects in Early Modern Italy, 1400–1600
    (2019-03-27) Mao, Natasha; Wolfthal, Diane
    This dissertation examines early modern Italian objects with movable mechanisms that require the viewer/user’s physical interaction including pop-up prints, deceptive drinking vessels, openable jewelry, mirrors, and cabinet of curiosities. It demonstrates that many artworks from this period acquired their meaning and value not solely through their visual aesthetics, but also from movable features that engaged their audience physically. Traditionally research in Italian art from 1400 to 1600 has focused on visual qualities. This dissertation instead examines the material aspect of art objects, that is, how they were touched and handled, using an object-based approach and the perspective of material culture studies to investigate social and cultural history. By exploring the gestures and movements involved in using interactive objects, I demonstrate that early modern art in Italy required considerably more physical interaction than scholars have previously acknowledged. Academic investigations along this line of inquiry have thus far focused on devotional objects, of which the majority of them came from the north of the Alps. This dissertation is the first to offer an examination of interactive objects across a wide range of contexts in Italy, including marriage, illicit sexuality, dining entertainment, and pursuit of knowledge and collecting. The first two chapters examine topics related to material reanimating of sensual experiences through interactive mechanisms. Chapter one explores objects within the context of marriage, where opening and closing specific containers symbolize accessing the female body and violation of virtues. Chapter two investigates objects related to illicit sexual desire, in particularly flap prints that reanimate the experience of encountering a courtesan in real life. Chapter three and four shift highlight and examine objects associated with intellectual pursuits, as many interactive objects provide “hands-on” learning experience. Chapter three analyzes deceptive drinking cups, whose interactive mechanisms are related to a renewed interest in Hellenistic technology and conviviality. Chapter four examines multi-compartmental cabinets, where retrieving secret drawers can be seen as the user-viewer’s desire to uncover knowledge hidden in the deepest recesses of nature. Ultimately, this dissertation advocates that object interaction should be considered a component in art historical examination of early modern art of Italy in the future.
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    "The Turbaned Heads, Each Wrapped in Twisted Folds of the Whitest Silk": Images of Muslims in Netherlandish Art, 1400-1700
    (2021-11-11) Van Wingerden, Carolyn; Wolfthal, Diane
    This dissertation brings together a wide variety of print images of Muslims by Netherlandish artists from the early modern period, roughly 1400 to 1700. While scholars have studied early modern Italian and German images of Muslims in some detail, no study until now specifically focuses on the woodcuts, engravings, and etchings of Muslims by Dutch and Flemish artists. My work is the first to argue that as contact between actual Muslims and Netherlandish artists becomes more commonplace later in the sixteen century and into the seventeenth century, the resultant print images present a view of Muslims that is increasingly nuanced and true-to-life. My dissertation further analyzes the print genre as a global art form due to the portability of prints and confirms that Netherlandish print images of Muslims lived long, transnational lives in the New World and beyond. Chapter 1 uses the theoretical concept of temporality to explicate my emphasis on contemporaneous, non-Christian imagery while clarifying terminology and analyzing related medieval examples of European representations of Muslims. The second chapter contends that fifteenth-century Netherlandish print images of turbaned figures sometimes represent Muslims and sometimes do not; effectively, Netherlandish artists in this period use turbaned figures to represent that which is eastern, foreign, and non-Christian without much attention to the realities about which people in the fifteenth century actually wore turbans. The third chapter claims that sixteenth-century Netherlandish print images of Muslims become more nuanced and true-to-life as the turban starts to become almost exclusively associated with the image of the Muslim. In the fourth chapter, I argue that trade rules the day in seventeenth-century Netherlandish prints, which depict Muslims, highlighting the Dutch tolerance for differing religious mores if these Muslims exemplify reliable trading partners. Finally, the fifth chapter presents an in-depth case study of a truly transcultural work of art — a seventeenth-century folding screen, or biombo, made in viceregal Mexico but based on a Dutch print series that illustrates the 1683 Battle of Vienna between the Ottoman Empire and the Habsburg Empire.
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    Veiled Epiphanies: Encountering the Body of Christ within the Art and Architecture of the Poor Clares of Central Italy (ca. 1212-1350)
    (2024-08-05) Harless, Michael Shane; Derbes, Anne; Wolfthal, Diane
    This dissertation focuses on the art and architecture of the Clarissan Order in Italy during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and how these cloistered women participated in the church services from the remote location of their choir. To safeguard the enclosure of the nuns, the choirs of the Clarisse were routinely located in inferior positions that consistently prevented a direct line of vision to the altar. This limited contact with the contiguous lay church severely impacted the nuns’ visual participation in the Mass. By analyzing the spatial experience, architectural layout, sculptural and painted embellishment of extant nuns’ choirs throughout Italy, this research investigates how cloistered viewers sought access to the body of Christ through images, transforming their enclosed precincts into prime resources for ocular communion. Given the unexplored frontier surrounding the sacramental nature of Clarissan art, this study seeks to fill this research gap by examining how devotional images functioned as visual substitutes to facilitate communion with Christ. While the sealed walls of the choir functioned to regulate nuns’ vision, these entombed spaces became a world unto themselves. These painted prayer chambers provided a bridge to the Holy Land, offering visual foci to reignite the senses by illuminating an alternative path to consume Christ. By performing a series of detailed case studies of surviving works from select foundations throughout Umbria, Lazio, Tuscany, and Campania, this dissertation examines the complex iconography employed within these paintings, revealing an advanced form of visual literacy operating inside the convents of the Clarisse.