Art history

Islamic book culture and book arts starts with the transformation from a fleeting oral retelling into a fixed and written text. This transformation played a central role in the artistic culture of the Islamic world. During the Ottoman empire, lots of books and especially Qur'ans were donated to public and religious institutions to express personal piety and secure power and prestige. This donation called " waqf " developed over the centuries and turned into a foundation. This donation resulted in the expansion of libraries throughout history. This survey aims to find out the role of traditional preservation methods in Ottoman libraries that survived over the centuries because of the careful and well-documented stewardship that was set up at the time many of these foundations were endowed. The foundation rules were written by the foundation owners who had an important role in book preservation. These rules were written in books or as a seal that provides short sentences about book preservation. "possession notes" and " owners seals " were written in order to specify the owner and save them from robbery. On the one hand, "talisman" words or sentences were written
to act as a guard to save books from damage or destruction. These foundation labors had a great effect on a book's preservation.

The article, starting from Carlo Volpe’s essay Il lungo percorso del dipingere dolcissimo e tanto unito (1983), focuses on the critic’s tendency to discuss artists and their works from a moral perspective, and to identify their aesthetic quality with their moral value. Within this framework, Volpe’s understanding of artists such as Giottino, Puccio Capanna and Andrea Orcagna are discussed, the latter being described with particularly condemning words.
The painters belonging to the “third giottesque manner”, on the other hand, are interpreted almost as heroes and prophets of a new worldview that will eventually lead to the Renaissance. Other essays from Volpe are then analysed, all of them regarding artists of the 14th century, like Pietro Lorenzetti, Pietro da Rimini and the Master of Figline, to point out that this approach formed a pattern which Volpe referred to throughout his whole career.
The author then puts Volpe’s production and thought in context, discussing Roberto Longhi’s legacy and Volpe’s relationship with contemporary artistic phenomena, and lastly addresses the philosophical significance of seeing art through the lens of moral issues, and how this affects the role of criticism and art history.

Starting from the presence of a painting by Aimé Morot among the slide collection of Charles Lang Freer, a collection otherwise devoted to modern American painters and Asian art, the essay traces back the origin of this slide to the collection of Ernest Fenollosa and untangles the documentation on how his slides found their home in the Freer Archives in Washington, D.C. Fenollosa's use of this slide to juxtapose ancient Japanese art and modern French painting is a starting point for reflecting on the role that the presence-or absence-of images played in printed texts as opposed to lectures, and how that in turn fueled the tendency towards stylistic comparisons. Lastly, the position of lantern slides as a tool that was once indispensable to art history, and now, in the digital era, becomes a historical and material object to be studied as such, allows us to reflect on one of the many epistemological shifts that we face as art historians.

Focussing on Italian art historian Roberto Longhi's seminal works on Piero della Francesca, and exposing the layers of narratives surrounding
and produced by (art) historical scholarship, this paper invites to
rethink our subject position as art historians.

Presented at the Tenth Annual Wollesen Memorial Graduate Symposium (Toronto, 13th-14thOctober 2023)

A human skull opens its jaw. Maybe in an obscene laugh? Metal, cables and wire form its body, which is erect in a coffin. A metal phallus protrudes from the lap. It is a scene that is difficult to reconcile at first with the clearly Christian motifs in the stained

and it sought to clarify methodological and theoretical questions as well as to reflect on our research in general. By investigating global dis:connections, the Centre is inaugurating a new research programme. It emphasises the roles of delays and detours, of interruptions and resistances, of the active absence of connections in globalisation processes and investigates their social significance. One of the starting premises is that connectivity and disconnectivitity are not dichotomous; they are, rather, mutually constitutive in a relationship we call 'dis:connectivity'. Fundamental methodological questions about how to research dis:connectivity remain to be answered. The central terms and how to apply them also demand attention. Multi-perspectival research on dis:connectivity fosters interdisciplinary dialogue on these questions. The conference also served as a space for just such a dialogue. Artists and scholars interacted, with each side gaining the benefit of exposure to the other. The conference comprised three thematic panels -absences, detours and interruptions -to structure and concretise the discourse. Richard M. Kabiito opened the event with the panel on absences. With a paper on Globalising Ugandan art: remixing the contest

Die Dissertation beschreibt die facettenreiche Entwicklung moderner Malerei in München in den ersten Jahren nach Ende des Zweiten Weltkriegs. Ausgehend von der allgemeinen deutschen Kunstentwicklung nach 1945 wird die Situation der Kunst der Stadt München analysiert und auf ihre Modernität hin geprüft. Die Arbeit basiert auf der Gegenüberstellung der öffentlichen Ausstellungspolitik und privater Ausstellungsinitiativen, ebenso wie auf der Kunstpolitik der amerikanischen Alliierten. Betrachtet werden allgemein gesellschaftspolitische Aspekte wie auch die Kunstpolitik des "Dritten Reichs", aus der die Malerei der Nachkriegszeit in Deutschland erwuchs. Neben dem Schwerpunkt der Situation moderner Malerei der Münchner Nachkriegszeit liegt ein anderer im Bereich der Kunstrezeption, die sich sowohl in der wertenden Kritik der damaligen Presserezensionen als auch in den durch das vorgefundene Quellenmaterial belegbaren Reaktionen der Münchner Ausstellungsbesucher offenbart.