Papers by Charles Burroughs
Iconocrazia: Journal of Art and Politics
Raphael's capacity to thrive at court stands out in an age of manners and reflections on manners.... more Raphael's capacity to thrive at court stands out in an age of manners and reflections on manners. His reputation as a perfect courtier has been burnished by his association with Baldassare Castiglione, whose evocation of "the perfect courtier" was one of t he most influential books of the Cinquecento and whose portrait by Raphael seems to embody the qualities outlined by Castiglione himself. Castiglione's Book of the Courtier may represent a shift to self-conscious reflexivity in a long history of positive and negative writings on courts and courtiers. Nevertheless, it emerged in a culture used to visual representations of court life, from images of Mary as Queen of Heaven to more secular subjects, such as Mantegna's Camera degli Sposi or Signorelli's Court of Pan. In the Stanza della Segnatura , Raphael painted the court of Apollo on Parnassus with attendant beautiful women and talented and eloquent men (also women), as in Cast iglione's ideal court. Yet in the Stanza, there are indications of Raphael's capacity for sly and witty subversion of the overarching epideictic purpose; in this, too, perhaps, he was a perfect courtier.
Renaissance Quarterly, 1993
Res: Anthropology and aesthetics, 2006
Page 1. The demotic Campidoglio Ritual, social unrest, and a case of wizardry CHARLES BURROUGHS T... more Page 1. The demotic Campidoglio Ritual, social unrest, and a case of wizardry CHARLES BURROUGHS The magnificent reshaping of the Roman Campidoglio in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries launched an enduring paradigm for princely architecture (fig. ...
Artibus et historiae: an art anthology, 2017
Against the advice of a key collaborator, Giorgio Vasari enhances his Lives of the Artists with c... more Against the advice of a key collaborator, Giorgio Vasari enhances his Lives of the Artists with colorful anecdotes, taking up a tradition of story telling with deep Florentine roots. Thus Botticelli terrorized his neighbor by manhandling a great rock that was effectively, in Vasari’s telling, beyond human capacity to lift. This paper explores the resonances of this story with ideas about the powers of stone and relates these to current thinking about the agency of material objects, whether worked or unworked. Two discursive traditions are invoked. One is the place of certain kinds of stone in the Florentine imaginary as well as in the built environment and in ritual practice; here impulses from Boccaccio’s Decameron are foregrounded. The other involves the Renaissance reception of didactic poetry, notably that of Ovid and even Lucretius, which conjoins mythological and proto-scientific in explanation especially of the origins of things. We see such literary stimuli operative in programs like those devised by Vasari for the Palazzo Vecchio; these richly suggest and to a degree illustrate the properties and powers of stone.
Voices-the Journal of New York Folklore, 2014
At least on the map, the Genesee River dominates the city and region of Rochester, New York, as i... more At least on the map, the Genesee River dominates the city and region of Rochester, New York, as it cuts northward to bisect downtown before entering a deep gorge and joining its waters to Lake Ontario (see Figure 1). On the ground, certainly, the river is less evident and, in much of the city, it is the cluster of antennas on Pinnacle Hill that catch the eye. The antennas draw attention to an ancient "hummocky ridge," formed by glacial deposits, that runs roughly perpendicular to the river, just to the south of downtown (Grasso 1993, 112). The more prominent section of the ridge extends to the west of the river and is known locally as the Pinnacle Range; it has played a key role in the lives of Rochesterians for a century and a half. Where the Range meets the river on the western side, the glaciated, picturesque terrain is taken up by Mount Hope Cemetery, one of the great Victorian commemorative landscapes dedicated to the memory of the affluent and important (including Su...
Through the analysis of a major religious painting by Botticelli, this article builds on importan... more Through the analysis of a major religious painting by Botticelli, this article builds on important recent work on Botticelli’s sacred art to explore apparent responses on the part of an especially sophisticated artist to the gathering atmosphere of crisis in the city’s political and religious life. The artist uses various devices of connection or separation between the viewer/worshiper and the holy image; these devices are not unique to the painting, but their combination is exceptional. First, Botticelli uses a hieratic gold ground to distinguish a scene set in heaven, the coronation of the Virgin, from a more earthly zone; here recent scruples about the representation of transcendence seem to be in play. Second, the figures beneath, four major saints, embody different ways of addressing the viewer and mediating between him/her and the heavenly event. Third, the latter appears to be treated as an apsidal image within an implied architectural setting, in other words, as a representa...
Res: Anthropology and aesthetics, 2002
Mediaevalia, 2016
Few major cities have undergone so thorough a transformation as early modern Rome, where a shrunk... more Few major cities have undergone so thorough a transformation as early modern Rome, where a shrunken “gigantic cadaver” became a paradigmatic early modern theater of architectural magnificence, worthy of its ancient predecessor. No single site better exemplifies this transformation than the Campidoglio, the ancient Capitoline Hill, surmounted by a grand piazza bordered on three sides by palaces but open to the city on the fourth side where St. Peter’s dome, designed by Michelangelo for Pope Paul III (r. 1534–49), rises above the distant skyline. The same architect and patron played key roles in the sixteenth-century remodeling of the Campidoglio (Fig. 1), though the only building actually erected on the hill by the pope was not part of Michelangelo’s Capitoline ensemble. Early in his long pontificate, Paul saw to the construction of the Torre Farnese (or Paolina), a fortified residence designed with an eye to defense and domination, certainly not aesthetics. Until its demolition to make way for the Victor Emmanuel Monument (1885), the Torre Farnese was a looming presence on the hill, overlooking a city where by now numerous palaces exemplified the classicizing, formal language of the Renaissance, of which it showed hardly a trace. Nor could there be a stronger contrast with Michelangelo’s highly innovative and allusive designs for the civic palaces on the Campidoglio, though these were not realized until long after Paul’s death (the date of the design is a different issue, as noted below), or indeed with the same architect’s work, from 1546, on Paul’s own family palace, the Palazzo Farnese. It has recently been suggested that we should see the rustic character of the Torre Farnese, traditionally sometimes referred to as a villa, in a more positive light, and as
Streets: Critical Perspectives on Public Spaces
Paragone Past and Present, 2021
Boundaries demarcate property throughout European history, though the utopian dream of terrain wi... more Boundaries demarcate property throughout European history, though the utopian dream of terrain without boundaries recurs, not least in association with the figure of the free-roaming god Pan. Ancient Rome had a god of boundaries, Terminus, associated by Horace with venerable, quasi-natural landscapes of human occupation. In Renaissance culture, Terminus is represented as a hybrid figure—part human; part lithic; often incorporated into architecture. This essay identifies a composite object in a Roman sculpture collection, noted for figures of Pan, as a model for Erasmus’s widely divulged emblem of Terminus, featured in images by major artists. Initially identifying himself with Terminus’s resistance to divine authority, Erasmus met with criticism for arrogance. In response, he drew on Horace’s ethically colored evocation of Terminus, now in connection with the ultimate boundary, that between life and death, as appears in Hans Holbein’s moving design for a monument to the humanist.
Author(s): Burroughs, Charles | Abstract: Aby Warburg based his revolutionary approach to Renaiss... more Author(s): Burroughs, Charles | Abstract: Aby Warburg based his revolutionary approach to Renaissance art in large part on his study of the motif of what he called "the nymph." The nymph's ecstatic movement and association with flying and floating drapery elements embodied a Dionysian side of classical art in tension with the harmonious and balanced -- i.e., Apollonian -- character attributed to it since Winckelmann. In this paper I explore figures privileged by Warburg, examining their relation to mainly literary ancient sources and to the role played by each figure in the pictorial economy in whicb they are set. In particular I focus on social implications, having to do with not only with characterization in terms of rank and role but also, in one key case, place within an argument, sketched out in imagery, about the very nature of civil society.
This paper was my contribution to a series of invited lectures on the topic of "the Faca... more This paper was my contribution to a series of invited lectures on the topic of "the Facade" at the Architecture School of Syracuse University in Spring 2018. The lectures marked the retirement of Dean Randall Korman. A video of the talk was posted to YouTube but with a projected text that is in parts distorted or unintelligible. Accordingly, I thought it best to post an "official" though certainly in many ways provisional text.
‘world maps, navigation charts, and maps of Rome, Constantinople, France, and Italy’, Carlton spe... more ‘world maps, navigation charts, and maps of Rome, Constantinople, France, and Italy’, Carlton speculates that the printed map had become for its buyer less an object of contemplation or veneration than an affordable commodity. Cheaply produced, picturing many of the places and cities of an expanding world, the maps were mass produced in appeal to a public of different social strata. Laymen and experts alike could obtain views of great cities, of places far and near, whether in regional Italy, the Orient or even the Americas, so immediately that printmakers transformed urban centres (notably Florence and Rome) into open-ended microcosms. Rife with new information, available in manuscript, on separate sheets, or printed in order to appear in books, maps authored by Batista Agnese, Benedetto Bordone, Pirro Ligorio, Paolo Forlani, Giovanni Batista Ramusio and others transformed classical geography. A growing demand for maps raised consciousness about the relation of Italian regions with the world at large. Noting often that the maps contained ‘multiple messages’, Carlton appeals to a cognitive model of communication to indicate how, prior to their wholesale commodification, printed maps were seen and read in different and, at least initially, from their sellers’ standpoint, unpredictable ways. In a context far from that of the Medici family and the Guardaroba, Carlton shows that below the Palazzo, in the streets of Florence, Rome and other urban centres, a new cartographic consciousness was inspiring homeowners of different social strata to fashion map rooms and to decorate their domiciles as they wished. Affordable globes became common furnishings and, much as they are today, prints were framed and affixed to walls. Using as points of reference Sebastiano Serlio’s ground plans of domestic spaces and the maps in Marino Sanuto’s home, many Venetian households, argues Carlton in the final chapter, aimed not only to dazzle their visitors but, implicitly, to share new knowledge, to lay stress on the power of display and to ‘craft a cosmopolitan identity’. Encouraging novelty, where possible adding new information to their maps, printers mobilized a bustling trade that brought greater accuracy to the material in circulation. Hence consumers of sheet maps developed ‘a different cognitive relationship’ between image and place. On the one hand, buyers had a feeling of ‘synonymy’ when topographical views depicted the settings in which they were purchased and displayed. On the other hand, where printed world maps were shown, a new sense of singularity and totality invited viewers to fancy travel to and commerce with the faraway places whose images stood before their eyes. Rosen and Carlton raise pertinent issues concerning the nature of maps and power. For the patrons of map rooms Rosen suggests that an illusion of omnipotence comes with the assemblage of knowledge and science in a space carefully designed to dazzle and delight. The Guardaroba, argues Rosen, was designed to impart upon observers, as they turned one way and the other to survey the panoptic and panoramic views on the walls, a new sense of the ‘mapping of power’. A cartographic mechanism (in synchrony with a clock on the wall and the giant armillary sphere in the centre) generated an effect of control and mastery of the kind that Michel Foucault and J. Brian Harley discerned in their writings, respectively, on architecture and mapping. By contrast, Carlton argues that in looking at sheet maps solely from a political standpoint of power and control, viewers will miss the new sense of a mercantile cultural capital that took command in Italy and, by implication, a growing sense of social contradiction. In her view new maps were vital for economic development. They also stressed an ideology of identity in which individuals could imagine themselves related to the places they put on display in their homes, or else were cognizant of the character of greater worlds, the essence of which, depending on acquired wealth, may or may not have been beyond their reach. Thus, in Rosen’s meticulous account of the players and makers in the Guardaroba project, an ‘empire’ of maps is shown taking form in discrete, closed and inner spaces in Florence and Rome in the middle and later years of the cinquecento, whereas in Carlton’s treatment of the everyday life of a consumerist map trade, emphasis is placed on how maps become commonplaces, clichés as it were, of the cities in which they are purveyed. The result of extensive archival research in situ, both The Mapping of Power and Worldly Consumers are welcome complements to each other and to the study of mapped images in Renaissance Italy. Clearly written and deftly illustrated, they provide historical background and contextualization that will appeal to amateurs and specialists alike.
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Papers by Charles Burroughs