Papers by Robert S Nelson
Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, 1999
... essay, 'Tales of Two Cities: The Patronage of Early Palaeologan Art and Architecture... more ... essay, 'Tales of Two Cities: The Patronage of Early Palaeologan Art and Architecture in Constantinople and Thessaloniki', Manuel Panselinos ... less than what it had been during the reign of the previous emperor, much less those of the Middle or Early Byzantine periods, and ...
Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 1988
Wiener Jahrbuch für Kunstgeschichte, Dec 1, 1988
In their recent monograph on a group of late thirteenth-century illuminated manuscripts, H. Bucht... more In their recent monograph on a group of late thirteenth-century illuminated manuscripts, H. Buchthal and H. Belting juxtaposed a headpiece (fig. 1) from the Vatican Praxapostolos (gr. 1208), the masterpiece of their workshop, with an astonishingly similar design in a twelfth-century Gospel book in Melbourne (fig. 2). For the authors, the perceptive comparison served to demonstrate the debt that Palaeologan illuminated ornament owes to Comnenian models and to distinguish among different versions of the pattern by the atelier. As they explained, not all manuscripts reproduce the model faithfully. Closer to the Comnenian design is a headpiece (fig. 3) in Vat. gr. 1158, the deluxe Gospel book made for a female member of the imperial family, and hence the name sometimes given to the group, the Atelier of the Paleaologina 1 . Here the blue vines, set on the white parchment ground, are thick and substantial like those in the Melbourne volume. Leaves and stems form a dense web, whose horror vacui better imitates the earlier aesthetic than do the thin, delicate stems and ample spacing of the Praxapostolos headpiece (fig. 1). One stage further removed from the Comnenian source is the initial headpiece (fig. 4) in a Psalter in Paris, Bibl. Nat. gr. 21, where new palmettes, framed in a circle and set on a stark white ground, have been added to the four corners of the panel 2 . Here too, the thicket of large, *) The impetus for this paper came from a conversation with Hugo Buchthal over sixteen years ago. While he was working on a paper eventually to be published as ,Toward a History of Palaeologan Illumination' (in: The Place of Book Illumination in Byzantine Art, Princeton 1975, pp. 143-177), we talked about possible Islamic sources for Palaeologan ornament, and ever since, the problem has intrigued me, as it did him. So far as I know, he has been the only person to have commented on the matter, first in that article (p. 161). More recently he again evoked Islamic sources for the ornament in a manuscript of the earlier Decorative Style (Studies in Byzantine Illumination of the Thirteenth Century, in: Jb. der Berliner Museen, 25, 1983, p. 46). While I long thought his intuitions to be sound, this study helped me to understand how and why. Finally several years after the completion of my text, the long awaited book of A. Weyl Carr on the Decorative Style has appeared (Byzantine Illumination 1150-1250, the Study of a Provincial Tradition, Chicago 1987). I have incorporated references to it in my footnotes but have not adjusted the body of my text, since she is not directly concerned with the matter of Islamic influence. ') H. BUCHTHAL and H. BELTING, Patronage in Thirteenth-Century Constantinople, An Atelier of Late Byzantine Book Illumination and Calligraphy, Washington 1978, pp. 76, 89-90, 99. The headpiece for Mark in the Melbourne Gospels is not a standard design and occurs in no other twelfth-century manuscript known to me. Its rarity increases the likelihood that the artists of the Atelier may have known this very manuscript, although the three other headpieces in the Gospel book appear to have had no impact in the late thirteenth century. The remaining headpieces are published in H.
Gesta, 2004
Details of the garments of the saints in the vaults of the outer narthex of the fourteenth-centur... more Details of the garments of the saints in the vaults of the outer narthex of the fourteenth-century church of the Chora in Constantinople resemble contemporary aristocratic fashion and associate the heavenly and earthly courts. SS. George and Demetrios flanking the entrance to the nave, though among the most popular in Byzantium, were also important to the reigning Palaiologan dynasty and to the current emperor, Andronikos II, and his prime minister, Theodore Metochites, the patron of the church. St. Andronikos, third in the saintly hierarchy, never enjoyed such prominence in any other church and may be interpreted as a reference to the emperor himself. Located next to a scene of the Holy Family's Enrollment for Taxation, St. Andronikos lends heavenly approval to the necessary, but controversial, fiscal policies of the patron and is an integral part of a decorative program that is simultaneously religious and political.
The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 2000
Visuality before and beyond the Renaissance : seeing as others saw / edited by Robert S. Nelson. ... more Visuality before and beyond the Renaissance : seeing as others saw / edited by Robert S. Nelson. p. cm.-(Cambridge studies in new art history and criticism) ISBN --- (hardback) . Visual perception. . Visual communication. . Art, Comparative. . Art and religion. I. Nelson, Robert S., -II. Series.
Art Bulletin, Mar 1, 1997
This is an essay about knowledges of space and time that aspire to be global but remain local, an... more This is an essay about knowledges of space and time that aspire to be global but remain local, and about their inscription in the discipline of art history. It proceeds from the microcosm to the macrocosm, from particular points on the spatial surface of art history to its broad, totalizing plane, and thence to an awareness of the jagged, gerrymandered divisions of art history itself. It wends its way from moments in the present and the lived past to distant pasts dimly remembered in a discipline that typically studies the histories of everything but itself, conveniently forgetting that it, too, has a history and is History. The intent is to examine noticns that exist, as Foucault suggests, at the level of a disciplinary unconsciousness and to argue that Order, History, Space, and Time do matter. Through them, art history is constituted and, in turn, constitutes objects, narratives, and peoples. Yet what is made can be unmade or re-sited, re-structured, and re(-)formed, and what has become tangible and reified can revert to mere heuristic category, if first consciously addressed. The argument takes for granted that contemporary art history, like any other academic subject or learned profession, is a practice, a discipline, a narrative, and a rhetoric with its own history, protocols, and institutional structures. In the admittedly small but growing body of literature about the
De Gruyter eBooks, Dec 31, 2022
My essay explores the ways that art historians use images and words to inform their publics, base... more My essay explores the ways that art historians use images and words to inform their publics, based mainly on evidence from the United States. The performative aspects of lectures with photographic slides are studied from versions available on the internet. With the profession's change to digital images and Powerpoint, the larger aspects of oral presentations remained the same, but the possibility of multiple images and texts on Powerpoint slide greatly increased the amount of information imparted, but image quality declined. No longer tied to physical slides, the art historian could prepare anywhere and with Zoom lecture from anywhere, but the result was a decline in the shared community of the slide collection and physical interaction with audiences. Moreover, digital lectures imitated cinema in ways different from early slide lectures. As a teaching took, virtual reality can function without a lecturer, or if used in class, the teacher can not longer control what the class sees in when. It also changes the relation of audiences to images, for now spectators inhabit the image with results that once more recall cinema.
ARLIS/NA newsletter, Feb 1, 1979
De Gruyter eBooks, Dec 3, 2018
Gesta, 1996
Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears... more Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact
CAA.reviews, Jun 25, 1999
Art Bulletin, Dec 1, 1985
Little-studied frescoes of high quality at the Duomo in Genoa are attributed to a Byzantine paint... more Little-studied frescoes of high quality at the Duomo in Genoa are attributed to a Byzantine painter and to a period of renovation at the cathedral about 1310. Their style compares favorably with the finest work of Constantinople, and their iconography is substantially Byzantine in detail. But as a whole, the content of the Last Judgment is Italian, chiefly Tuscan, and derives from theological concerns of Western Christianity that were not shared with Byzantium. Such a hybrid is characteristically Genoese, from a period when Byzantine artists traveled widely.
Art History, Jun 1, 1989
Art is made to be seen. Although few art historians, I trust, would quarrel with such a statement... more Art is made to be seen. Although few art historians, I trust, would quarrel with such a statement, most focus on the making rather than the seeing, or upon the intentions of the maker, not the reception, perception and interpretation of viewers, past or present. When deliberate attention is paid to the procedures by which images and viewers come together, many issues become problematic on both sides of what Roman J akobson in his famous diagram represents as an addresser sending a message to an addressee. 1 They are joined by those factors that enable communication to take place: context, the referent of the message; contact, the physical and psychological channels through which or by which addresser and addressee interact; and code, the communicative system shared by the two parties. Such a model has a certain utility. By focusing on the entire communicative process, the system transcends the traditional art-historical preoccupation with the makers of images through the inclusion of the intended audiences and shifts the enquiry towards the facilitators of communication. Works of art, however, usually outlast their primary producers or consumers, and necessarily do so in the case of medieval object that are extant today. Thus a private objet d'art, passed down through a family, survives only if later generations reaffirm its prior character or value at least to the extent of preserving it. The same is true of public art. For example, if a church fresco is no longer appreciated, a later congregation may replace it with something more appropriate for their needs. Thus for art after its inception, consumers become producers, always affirming or denying, perpetuating or transforming the object's significance for themselves and other audiences. As we approach our world, art historians playa major role in this process. In the nineteenth century, scholars literally appropriated medieval art from its inheritors, when monument commissions declared that a church or an altarpiece belonged not just to the local parish but also to the national patrimony, which was, in turn, largely defined by those same scholars. 2 Today art historians and the repositories of art are the producers of medieval art for a modern public. In transforming the medieval object into art, as defined by modern values, we direct and control the context, contact and code, inJakobson's terms. Occasionally we further attempt to give the object back to the Middle Ages.
Gesta, 2002
Michael Camille, a brilliant and imaginative art historian, forty-four years old, died of a brain... more Michael Camille, a brilliant and imaginative art historian, forty-four years old, died of a brain tumor in April 2002. He was the Mary L. Block Professor at the University of Chicago, where he had taught since 1985. The author of six books and dozens of articles, Camille specialized in the history of Gothic art in England and France. Working between the latest critical theory and specialized scholarship on the Middle Ages, he succeeded in making his subjects appeal to diverse audiences, witness the translation of his books into Spanish, French, Japanese, and Korean and invitations to be interviewed on radio programs in Britain and the United States, one of which can still be heard ("This American Life," Episode 38, October 11, 1996, at www.thislife.org). As a scholar, Camille was innovative, if controversial, and above all productive. To highlight that productivity, and because much of his tremendous output has appeared in occasional volumes and out-of-the-way places, we append a comprehensive bibliography of his writings, prepared by one of his students, Kerry Boeye. As we review some of the highpoints in the oeuvre, we also offer an appreciation of a valued and much missed colleague for those who did not have the pleasure of his company. Born in Keighley in Yorkshire, Michael attended the local grammar school, where a beloved teacher, Audrey Collingham, inspired his interest in art and encouraged his scholarly aspirations. He was said to have been the first student from his school in fifty years to make it to "Oxbridge." Admitted to Cambridge University, he studied English, then History of Art, working on medieval art with George Henderson and, informally, on critical theory with Norman Bryson, an important influence. His tutor at Peterhouse, Martin Golding, remembers that Camille "was from a working-class home where there were no books: he once told me that the first night he was in College he said to himself, 'I'm in a town full of books, and I want to read them all!'" Awarded a first class degree in 1980, Michael completed his Cambridge Ph.D. in 1985.
Choice Reviews Online, 1988
Book Preface Excerpt: In October 1984, the Department of Art of the University of Chicago organiz... more Book Preface Excerpt: In October 1984, the Department of Art of the University of Chicago organized a symposium in celebration of the seventy-fifth anniversary of Frank Lloyd Wright\u27s Robie house, a landmark building on the university\u27s campus. Eight of the papers that were presented on that occasion have been revised and are published here; each of these offers fresh insight into Wright\u27s achievement, particularly the relation of his professional practice and personal philosophy to nature. Taken together, these papers provide a provocative interpretation of Wright\u27s originality and present a reevaluation of his work in relation to that of his predecessors and his contemporaries, architects as well as writers.https://nsuworks.nova.edu/nsudigital_flwbooks/1180/thumbnail.jp
Uploads
Papers by Robert S Nelson