Matching Items (33)
Description
From inception, the earliest museums in Europe were a haven for artifacts, many of which represented world cultures within its walls. The tradition of encyclopedic collecting characterized European museums and U.S. institutions modeled themselves after this example. In the 20th century, defining cultural property, in the form of excavated objects, became a priority for many nations and resulted in the scrutiny of ancient artifacts, in particular. This led to the establishment of international protocols which sought to protect items during times of both peace and war. Despite international legislation, the trade of illicit antiquities continued. A major advocate for repatriation, the nation of Italy aggressively sought return of many objects from antiquity and recently approached the Metropolitan Museum of Art regarding several items whose provenance was suspect. Ultimately the conflict was resolved through The Metropolitan Museum of Art-Republic of Italy Agreement of February 21, 2006, which transferred the title of six antiquities to Italy in return for long term loans of equivalent objects to the museum. The landmark agreement represents a mutually profitable resolution to a situation potentially plaguing thousands of institutions worldwide. The implications of replication of the agreement can potentially change how museums, nations and the public understand concepts of ownership and may reduce the role of permanent collections in favor of sharing, rather than possessing, world heritage.
ContributorsFeller, Andrea (Author) / Serwint, Nancy (Thesis advisor) / Sweeney, J. Gray (Committee member) / Sealy Lineberry, Heather (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2011
Description
Morgan Library MS M.905 (the Geese Book) is the last known illuminated gradual produced for the Church of St. Lorenz in Nuremberg, Germany. The Geese Book, which was created during the early sixteenth century, has been in the collection of the Morgan Library since 1961. This thesis describes the iconography of the eight historiated initials that illustrate the earthly life of Christ from the Annunciation to the Ascension. A detailed description of the content of each initial is followed by a brief history of the iconographic development of the identified event in order to determine whether or not the Geese Book uses a standard or nonstandard iconography. The results of this analysis reveal how this manuscript fits into the broader contexts of Christian art as well as the specific time and place of its creation. It shows that the iconography of the Geese Book reflected current theological beliefs and societal norms and allowed contemporary viewers of the Geese Book to feel a strong connection to the depicted events.
ContributorsDankert, Rebecca Lynn (Author) / Schleif, Corine (Thesis advisor) / Schier, Volker (Committee member) / Brown, Claudia (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2011
Description
This thesis focuses on the erotic depictions of Lucretia and Susanna in Renaissance art. Both noted for displaying exemplary chastity, Lucretia and Susanna gained popularity as Christian and secular role models for women in the late Middle Ages and Renaissance. My examination of the heroines addresses the seductive portrayal of these women in painting, which seemingly contradicts the essence of their celebrity. The images specifically analyzed in this thesis include: Lucas Cranach the Elder's Lucretia from 1525, Lucretia from 1533, and Venus from 1532 as well as Tintoretto's Susanna and the Elders and Annibale Carracci's Susanna and the Elders. The scope of my thesis includes both textual and visual analyses of the myths/figures and the disparity that arises between them. Employing Lucretia and Susanna as examples, my aim is to demonstrate a subtle subversion occurring within images of powerful women that ultimately strips them of their power.
ContributorsWilliamson, Jennifer Marie (Author) / Schleif, Corine (Thesis director) / Geschwind, Rachel (Committee member) / Pratt, Rebekah (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / School of Social Transformation (Contributor) / School of Human Evolution and Social Change (Contributor) / School of Art (Contributor)
Created2013-05
Description
This dissertation explores complex representations of spiritual, social and cultural ways of knowing embedded within engraved ivory drill bows from the Bering Strait. During the nineteenth century, multi-faceted ivory drill bows formed an ideal surface on which to recount life events and indigenous epistemologies reflective of distinct environmental and socio-cultural relationships. Carvers added motifs over time and the presence of multiple hands suggests a passing down of these objects as a form of familial history and cultural patrimony. Explorers, traders and field collectors to the Bering Strait eagerly acquired engraved drill bows as aesthetic manifestations of Arctic mores but recorded few details about the carvings resulting in a disconnect between the objects and their multi-layered stories. However, continued practices of ivory carving and storytelling within Bering Strait communities holds potential for engraved drill bows to animate oral histories and foster discourse between researchers and communities. Thus, this collaborative project integrates stylistic analyses and ethno-historical accounts on drill bows with knowledge shared by Alaska Native community members and is based on the understanding that oral narratives can bring life and meaning to objects within museum collections.
ContributorsChan, Amy (Author) / Duncan, Kate (Thesis advisor) / Toon, Richard (Committee member) / Parezo, Nancy (Committee member) / Serwint, Nancy (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
This study examines transnational connections between art as advertising and the tourism industry. The development of railroads, and later airlines, played a crucial role in the growth of travel. Art posters supported this expansion. By the mid-twentieth century, art posters gained wide acceptance for encouraging leisure travel. Posters and paintings were constructed by artists to visualize destinations, underscoring the social status and modern convenience of tourism. This thesis describes how advertising, as an aspect of popular visual culture, offered compelling parallels to stylistic developments in modern art.
ContributorsO'Dowd, Sarah (Author) / Sweeney, J Gray (Thesis advisor) / Serwint, Nancy (Committee member) / Cruse, Markus (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
The early-16th-century manuscript commonly known as the Geese Book (New York, Morgan Library, M. 905) contains the entire Mass liturgy sung by the boys choir of the parish church of St. Lorenz in Nuremberg, Germany prior to the Reformation. This thesis addresses the location and function of the sometimes enigmatic marginalia and the decorated or historiated initials in this large two-volume gradual. The paper begins with an analytical case study of a scene within the margins in which a wild woman, wielding a club, confronts a female dragon who has taken a child. Subsequently the size, subject matter, and physical positioning of the illuminations and decorations within the book and on its pages are examined with respect to the gradual's liturgical contents. It is hoped that through such methods, new conversations may begin as to the roles that marginalia and decoration may play within the multiple organizational schemes within a musical text of this kind.
ContributorsRoode, Jessica (Author) / Schleif, Corine (Thesis advisor) / Schier, Volker (Committee member) / Serwint, Nancy (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
Scholars have written much about home and meaning, yet they have said little about the professionally furnished model home viewed as a cultural artifact. Nor is there literature addressing how the home building industry uses these spaces to promote images of family life to increase sales. This research notes that not only do the structure, design, and layout of the model home formulate cultural identity but also the furnishings and materials within. Together, the model home and carefully selected artifacts placed therein help to express specific chosen lifestyles as that the home builder determines. This thesis considers the model home as constructed as well as builder's publications, descriptions, and advertisements. The research recognizes the many facets of merchandising, consumerism, and commercialism influencing the design and architecture of the suburban home. Historians of visual and cultural studies often investigate these issues as separate components. By contrast, this thesis offers an integrated framework of inquiry, drawing upon such disciplines as cultural history, anthropology, and material culture. The research methodology employs two forms of content analysis - image and text. The study analyzes 36 model homes built in Phoenix, Arizona, during the period 1955-1956. The thesis explores how the builder sends a message, i.e. images, ideals, and aspirations, to the potential home buyer through the design and decoration of the model home. It then speculates how the home buyer responds to those messages. The symbiotic relationship between the sender and receiver, together, tells a story about the Phoenix lifestyle and the domestic ideals of the 1950s. Builders sent messages surrounding convenience, spaciousness, added luxury, and indoor-outdoor living to a growing and discriminating home buying market.
ContributorsGolab, Coreen R (Author) / Brandt, Beverly K. (Thesis advisor) / Bernardi, Jose (Committee member) / Schleif, Corine (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
Western landscape photography helped to create an imaginative perception of a new nation for Americans. Early nineteenth-century photographers captured a vision of uncharted terrain that metaphorically fulfilled a two-fold illusion: an untouched Eden and a land ready and waiting for white settlement. The sublime and picturesque experiences of the West provided artists a concept that could be capitalized upon by employing various forms of manipulation. In the twentieth-century, the role of landscape photography evolved as did the advancement of the West. Images of wilderness became art and photographers chose to view the western landscape differently. Some focused more sharply and critically on the relationship between the land and the people who lived on it. The influential exhibition in 1975, New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-altered Landscape presented work that showed a landscape altered, marked by power lines, houses, and fences. The West as Eden no longer existed. Today, photographers continue to examine, image, and experience western land anew. In this thesis I examine the relationship of contemporary landscape photography and the role of the West, guided by an analysis that traces the history of American ideologies and attitudes toward natural land. The artists I have chosen recognize landscape not as scenery but as the spaces and systems people inhabit, and use manipulative strategies that emphasize an artificial character of the West. Their work elicits antecedent mythologies, pictorial models, and American ideologies that continue to perpetuate internationally.
ContributorsHerden, Nicole (Author) / Fahlman, Betsy (Thesis advisor) / Serwint, Nancy (Committee member) / Klett, Mark (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
This Master's thesis locates four works by William Dyce inspired by Dante Alighieri's Commedia: Francesca da Rimini (1837), Design for the Reverse of the Turner Medal (1858), Beatrice (1859), and Dante and Beatrice (date unknown) in the context of their literary, artistic and personal influences. It will be shown that, far from assimilating the poet to a pantheon of important worthies, Dyce found in Dante contradictions and challenges to his Victorian, Anglican way of thinking. In this thesis these contradictions and challenges are explicated in each of the four works.
ContributorsTiffany, Kristopher (Author) / Serwint, Nancy (Thesis advisor) / Gully, Anthony (Committee member) / Codell, Julie (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
Modern perceptions and stigmas have long been the bane of historical scholarship, and ancient Greek pederasty is no exception. Pederasty was a multifaceted practice which reflected the ideals and self-perception of the elite in Athens, while simultaneously propagating the hegemony of that class, yet it is often unfairly subjugated under the overly broad categorization of "homosexual practice." By examining the individual societal areas of pederasty - warfare, gymnasia, symposia, and hunting - through an analysis class, the discussion of pederasty can be shifted to assess the practice as "homosocial." Through this analysis of class, it can be demonstrated that the practice was one which had motivations that lay in the complexities of Greek social structure and not simply in eroticism. Through a class analysis, pederasty can also be seen as the ultimate, tangible expression of a union between male citizens and the profound desire for interpersonal connection.
ContributorsDeegan, Caitlin (Author) / Serwint, Nancy J. (Thesis advisor) / Bavuso, Francesca (Committee member) / Schleif, Corine (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012