Vanderbilt University History of Art Blog

Department to Honor HART Graduates at a Reception on May 7

History of Art majors and minors and their families and friends are invited to attend the department’s reception for our graduating seniors on Thursday, May 7, from 2 to 4 pm. The event will be held in the atrium of Cohen Memorial Hall on the Peabody campus, and awards will be presented at 3 pm.

Graduates and their families attending the reception are also invited to view the current exhibits in the Fine Arts Gallery near the atrium from noon to 4:00 p.m. Drawing on the combined resources of the Vanderbilt Fine Arts Gallery, the Eskind Biomedical Library Special Collections, local museums, and several private collections, the exhibit, entitled “Memento Mori: Looking at Death in Art and Illustration,” will be on view through May 23.
It features multiple perspectives on the nature of death and our attempts to memorialize the dead in order to give meaning to their lives.

“Up Close and Personal: Intimate Devotions and Everyday Objects in Late Antiquity,” an exhibition curated by Vanderbilt students that explores the devotional traditions of individuals who practiced Judaism, Christianity and Roman religions from the first century BCE to the seventh century CE, opens Thursday, May 7, in conjunction with the HART awards ceremony and celebration of graduates. This exhibit will be on view through September 4.

The gallery will also be open on Commencement Day (Friday, May 8) from noon to 4 pm, and Saturday, May 9, from 1 to 5 pm. Gallery hours for the summer are Tuesday-Friday, noon to 4 pm; Saturday, 1-5 pm. The gallery will be closed on Sundays and Mondays and on Saturday, July 4.

Posted by vrcvanderbilt on April 21, 2015 in Events, HART, Student/Alumni, VRC

---

Shaneyfelt Examines Workshop Practices in Renaissance Perugia

An article by Sheri Shaneyfelt, senior lecturer and director of undergraduate studies, Department of History of Art, was recently published in the March 2015 issue of The Art Bulletin (Volume XCVII, Number 1). The article, “The Società del 1496: Supply, Demand, and Artistic Exchange in Renaissance Perugia,” is part of a larger project on workshop practices in Renaissance Perugia, circa 1480-1520. Shaneyfelt’s research and publications focus on Renaissance Umbria, particularly the school of Perugino.

In May 1496 five local artists opened a shared workshop in Perugia, creating a painters’ cooperative, known as the Società del 1496. An analysis of the formation and operation of their enterprise, their active civic roles, individual and collaborative works and their costs, as well as their interrelations with Perugino, Pintoricchio, and Raphael—the more famous painters active in the city—provide a more complete picture of the society’s integral position in Renaissance Perugia. The result is a greater understanding of how communal artistic production was designed to meet the increasing demand for art in central Italy around 1500.

*Pietro Perugino, The Madonna della Consolazione, 1496-1498, tempera on panel, 146 x 104 cm. Galleria Nazionale dell’Umbria, Perugia.

Posted by vrcvanderbilt on April 14, 2015 in HART, VRC

---

Applications for Fine Arts Gallery Internships Due Friday, April 17

Vanderbilt University Fine Arts Gallery internships are designed to give Vanderbilt students an opportunity to gain hands-on, behind-the-scenes experience in a university art gallery setting. Interns will contribute to a variety of projects, including our digital imaging project, exhibition research and label copy writing, student outreach, and exhibition preparatory work. In addition, interns will assist with the day-to-day operations of the gallery.

Interns are expected to commit to a four-hour time slot per week in the gallery for two semesters. Day of the week and time will be coordinated with the gallery staff once academic schedules are in place. Responsibilities include research and exhibition writing; serving as a docent in the gallery for special events and group visits; scanning and sizing artwork for the digital imaging project; coding and adding information to the collection database, and contributing to exhibition preparatory work.

Experience in the following areas is preferred: a strong academic background in art, art history, or a related discipline (please list classes taken); research and writing skills; Photoshop: digital imaging, and strong computer skills (word, excel, database experience).

Students interested in applying for the 2015-2016 Fine Arts Gallery internships should email application materials to Margaret Walker (margaret.walker@vanderbilt.edu) by Friday, April 17. Application must include letter indicating your interest and a resume, including relevant coursework, writing sample, and two letters of reference.

Posted by vrcvanderbilt on April 13, 2015 in Fine Arts Gallery, HART, Student/Alumni, VRC

---

Vivien Fryd to Lecture on Henry Ries at Symposium Held in May

Vivien Green Fryd, professor of history of art, will present a paper next month at the Critical Topography Symposium, Trent University, Peterborough, and Ryerson University, Toronto. Fryd, niece of the New York Times photographer Henry Ries (1917-2004) will address the topic Henry Ries’ Photographs of the Brandenburg Gate, 1937-1981: Collective Trauma, Struggle, and Identity.

Ries, a Berlin-born Jew who fled Hitler with his sister (Fryd’s mother) in 1938, returned to Germany after the war and often used images of mundane life to contrast the darkness of war’s aftermath. Among his most evocative pictures of postwar Germany are his images of the Berlin airlift in 1948 and 1949.

*Henry Ries, Brandenburg Gate, gelatin silver print, ca. 1937

Posted by vrcvanderbilt on April 13, 2015 in Events, HART, Lectures, VRC

---

HART Student Research Symposium Slated for Thursday, April 16

Graduating seniors and history of art majors Jodi Chamberlain, Jessica DeAngelo, Clee Malfitano, and Holly McKee are the featured speakers at the fourth annual Student Research Symposium on Thursday, April 16, at 4:10 p.m. in Cohen Hall 203. A reception in the atrium will immediately follow the symposium.

Paper topics include San Vitale and Its Imperial Portrait Panels: A New Look from the Sixth-Century Viewers’ Perspective (Jodi Chamberlain); Follow the Ladder: Visual Analysis of a Dominican Antiphonary Page (Jessica DeAngelo); Gutzon Borglum’s Mount Rushmore National Memorial (Clee Malfitano), and ‘Flashpoint, Berlin!’ A comparative analysis of the photographs of Henry Ries and Gerhard Gronefeld documenting the Allied Occupation of Berlin (Holly McKee).

Sponsored by the Department of History of Art and the Vanderbilt History of Art Society, the symposium is open to the public and will be documented on video for future posting on the departmental website.

Posted by vrcvanderbilt on April 13, 2015 in Events, HART, Lectures, Student/Alumni, VRC

---

Leonard Folgarait Part of Flexner Dean’s Lecture on April 14

The Flexner Dean’s Lecture, “Memento Mori: Clinical and Historical Readings on Death in Art,” will be held on Tuesday, April 14, from noon to 1 p.m. in 208 Light Hall in the Vanderbilt University Medical Center. The lecture will be an interdisciplinary conversation on close readings led by John Sergent, professor of medicine, Leonard Folgarait, professor of history of art, and Holly Tucker, professor of French studies and professor in the center for biomedical ethics and society.

Each of the speakers will analyze one of the pages from Andreas Vesalius’s book on anatomy, De humani corporis fabrica (On the Fabric of the Human Body), from their respective academic disciplines. A 1555 edition of the work is currently on display in the Memento Mori—Looking at Death in Art and Illustration exhibition at the Vanderbilt Fine Arts Gallery housed in Cohen Memorial Hall on the Peabody campus.

The lecture is open to the public, and lunch will be provided. To RSVP, email opahse@vanderbilt.edu and indicate your RSVP for the “medicine in art” lecture.

*Andreas Vesalius, Flemish (1514-1564)
De humani corporis fabrica (On the Fabric of the Human Body)
Second Edition, 1555
Bound Woodcuts
The Eskind Biomedical Library Special Collections

Posted by vrcvanderbilt on April 13, 2015 in Events, Fine Arts Gallery, HART, Lectures, VRC

---

Tara Zanardi to Present Goldberg Lecture on Thursday, April 9

Tara Zanardi, assistant professor of art history at Hunter College, will present the Norman L. and Roselea J. Goldberg Lecture in Art History on Thursday, April 9, at 4:10 p.m. in 203 Cohen Hall. Her lecture is entitled “Porcelain Pleasures and the Allure of the East: Charles III and China,” with a reception to follow in the atrium.

“Tara Zanardi’s scholarly interests engage the art and visual culture of Spain and its global empire during the long eighteenth century,” said Christopher Johns, the Norman L. and Roselea J. Goldberg Professor of History of Art.

Zanardi (PhD, University of Virginia) teaches courses on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European art that consider a wide range of topics—art and politics, the development of museums, national identities and cultural representations, fashion, gender, and global exchange.

She has published widely in a number of scholarly journals, including Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte and Eighteenth-Century Studies, and has received numerous prestigious fellowships. Her first book, Majismo and the Pictorial Construction of Elite Identity in Eighteenth-Century Spain (Penn State University Press) will appear later this year.

Her new book project, titled Global Exchange and Tropical Play: Chinerìa in Spanish Visual and Material Culture, focuses on “the deployment of colonial exoticisms in Spain and its empire, attempting to understand in the political and artistic context why certain artistic choices were made and others avoided,” said Johns. Zanardi will explore the highly fashionable and “exotic” eighteenth-century decorative mode of chinoiserie in primarily two major sites, the royal palaces of Madrid and Aranjuez. It will be the first in-depth analysis of chinoiserie in Spanish interior design, textiles, and decorative arts.

Sponsored by the Department of History of Art, the Goldberg Lecture is free and open to the public. Limited parking is available in Lot 95 outside Cohen Hall, off 21st Avenue South on the Peabody campus and across from Medical Center East. For more information, call the department at 615.322.2831.

Posted by vrcvanderbilt on April 6, 2015 in Events, HART, Lectures, VRC

---

Workshop to Explore Difference in Asian Buddhist Traditions

Buddhist traditions—in all their diversity—-have been formed through processes of exchange, negotiation, and contestation in the face of perceived difference. These perceptions have existed both among individuals identifying as Buddhist (with regard to sectarian distinctions) and in situations when Buddhists encountered other religious traditions.

“Networks and Religious Difference in Asian Buddhist Traditions” is the focus of a workshop that will be held Friday and Saturday, April 3-4, at the Vanderbilt Divinity School, room 129. The workshop will explore how Buddhists active in Asia have negotiated difference and categories of identity. Conveners are Rob Campany, professor and director, Asian studies program, Nancy Lin, assistant professor, departments of religious studies and history of art, and Bryan Lowe, assistant professor, department of religious studies.

The workshop will pay special attention to “networks,” a term that in this context refers not only to human relations but also to those among material objects, practices, texts, and ideas. Workshop participants will consider both how theories of networks afford new insight into the ways Buddhists have negotiated identities and formed trans-regional communities, and how Buddhist communities have been constituted, in part, in relation to religious others. The conveners believe that a focus on networks and on dynamic relationships as opposed to stable entities will open new research questions, offering alternatives to narratives that rigidly assert alterity through reified “sects” or “isms” and to the difference-effacing language of syncretism and amalgamation.

Nancy Lin will make introductions and map the intellectual project at the beginning of the workshop on Friday morning, April 3. In the afternoon she will moderate the panel discussion on “Regimes of Knowledge Through Monastic Networks.” Tracy Miller, associate professor of history of art, will moderate the Saturday morning panel (April 4) on “Translocal Objects, Sites, and Structures.”

The workshop is made possible through generous support from the Fant Fund, Office of the Dean, College of Arts and Science; the Religious Studies and the History of Art departments, and the Asian Studies program. For those who wish to attend the workshop as an observer, please contact Christen Harper (christen.harper@vanderbilt.edu).

*Images: Reconstructed plans after Zhong Xiaoqing, “Bei Wei Luoyang Yongningsi ta,” modified by Tracy Miller, associate professor of history of art, Vanderbilt University

Posted by vrcvanderbilt on April 2, 2015 in Events, HART, Lectures, VRC

---

Minku Kim to Address Sŏkkuram in a Eurasian Context on April 2

Minku Kim, assistant professor of art history, University of Minnesota, will deliver a lecture entitled “Sŏkkuram in a Eurasian Context” on Thursday, April 2, at 4:10 pm in Cohen Memorial Hall 203.

Sŏkkuram (literally, “Stone Grotto Chapel”) is a mid-8th century lapidary Buddhist sanctuary near Kyŏngju, South Korea, created during the Unified Silla period (668-935 CE). With its domed rear section buried to create a cave-like effect, this extraordinary ashlar masonry temple is constructed of a rectangular antechamber, a narrow vaulted corridor, and a rotunda sanctum featuring a granite sculpture of the Buddha, placed imposingly at the center for circumambulatory worship.

In regard to its unique architectural configuration, Kim will attempt to trace its origin to the extent of the Iranian tradition developed under the Parthians (ca. 250 BCE-ca. 224 CE) and the Sassanians (224-642 CE). Similar rock-cut Buddhist monasteries in Kucha (Xinjiang) will be discussed as cognate cases in point.

Kim specializes in Chinese art and architecture between the Han and Six Dynasties (206 BCE-589 CE), particularly in relation to Buddhism. His research encompasses the pan-Buddhist world in its entirety. As a result, he is interested in the relationships within and among cultures in Eurasia. Korea is also a prominent concern throughout his research.

He is currently working on two book-length monographs tentatively titled Sculpture for Worship: Buddhism and The Cult of Statues in Early Medieval China and The Art of Buddhist Antiquarianism: Buddhist Epigraphic Data from Third- to Fourth-Century China.

Free and open to the public, Kim’s lecture is sponsored by the Asian Studies Program, Department of History, Department of History of Art, and Department of Religious Studies. Parking is available in Lot 95 outside Cohen Hall, off 21st Avenue South on the Peabody campus and across from Medical Center East. For more information, call the Asian Studies Program at 615.322.7329.

Posted by vrcvanderbilt on March 30, 2015 in HART, Lectures, VRC

---

Late Antiquity Seminar Announces Kate Cooper’s March 27 Lecture

The Robert Penn Warren Center’s seminar on Late Antiquity announces a lecture by Kate Cooper, professor of ancient history at the University of Manchester (UK), on Friday, March 27, at 4:00 pm in room 122 of the Divinity School. Cooper’s lecture is entitled “Virgins, Mothers, and Martyrs: Women in Early Christian Africa.”

Cooper will discuss her recent book, Band of Angels: The Forgotten World of Early Christian Women, in which she brings together the fruits of many years of academic research on women’s “hidden” contribution to the growth of Christianity in its early centuries.

“More than anything,” she suggests, “the vitality of early Christianity was built on the power of stories: stories told around the table at mealtimes, in prayer meetings, to children at bedtime. It was by handing down stories that the earliest Christians remembered the life and death of Jesus, and captured its meaning for their own communities and for the future. Naturally, women played an important part in this. Wonderfully, we are closer to understanding women’s contribution to the early Church than we have been at any time in history.”

This event is sponsored by the Department of Classical Studies, the Carpenter Program in Religion, Gender and Sexuality at Vanderbilt Divinity School, and the Late Antiquity seminar at the Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities.

Posted by vrcvanderbilt on March 25, 2015 in Events, HART, Lectures, VRC

---