Vanderbilt University History of Art Blog

Richard Talbert to Deliver AIA Lecture on January 28

Richard Talbert, the William Rand Kenan, Jr. Professor of History and Classics at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, will deliver the Archaeological Institute of America lecture at 7:00 pm on Tuesday, January 28, at the Nashville Parthenon. His lecture is entitled “The Magnificent Peutinger Map: Roman Cartography at its Most Creative.”

Talbert’s historical interests within antiquity are broad and varied, ranging from Spartans and western Greeks to government and society in the Roman empire, and above all in recent years mapping, travel and worldview. The establishment of Chapel Hill’s unique Ancient World Mapping Center followed his publication of the groundbreaking Barrington Atlas of the Greek and Roman World (2000).

Much of his major work, Rome’s World: the Peutinger Map Reconsidered (Cambridge University Press, 2010), is a digital presentation, enabling readers to engage with the Peutinger Map more closely than ever before. The Peutinger Map is the only map of the Roman world to come down to us from antiquity, and Talbert offers a reinterpretation and appreciation of the map as a masterpiece of both mapmaking and imperial Roman ideology. He proposes that the map’s true purpose was not to assist travelers along Rome’s highways but rather to celebrate the restoration of peace and order by Diocletian’s tetrarchy.

Free and open to the public, Talbert’s lecture is sponsored by the Nashville Society of the Archaeological Institute of America and Vanderbilt’s department of classical studies. Those who plan to attend the lecture are encouraged to call the Nashville Parthenon at 615.862.8431 to reserve a seat.

Posted by vrcvanderbilt on January 22, 2014 in HART, Lectures, VRC

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Illustrations of Fritz Eichenberg Featured in Fine Arts Gallery Exhibit

The Vanderbilt Fine Arts Gallery celebrates the opening of Fritz Eichenberg – Artist of the Book with an opening reception on Thursday, January 16, from 5 to 7 pm in Cohen Hall on the Peabody campus. The exhibit, curated by Joseph S. Mella, gallery director, will remain on view through February 27.

The focus of Fritz Eichenberg – Artist of the Book is a selection of forty illustrations that Eichenberg created for twelve classic works of literature, including wood engravings he made for a 1938 edition of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, the first major work of literature he illustrated after immigrating to the United States from Germany. Also featured are illustrations for Resurrection and Childhood, Boyhood, Youth, both by Leo Tolstoy; a two-volume set of Emily and Charlotte Brontë’s works, Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre; Tales of Edgar Allen Poe; and Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, among others.

Eichenberg’s life was shaped by his firsthand experience of World War I in Cologne, Germany, and his immigration to the United States in 1933 as Germany was preparing for another war. Eichenberg was a highly sensitive person with a quick eye, a sharp wit, a passionate love of literature, and an equally intense commitment to the truth. He combined these qualities to produce several careers’ worth of work as a political cartoonist, book illustrator, religious radical (he was a major contributor to the newspaper of the Catholic Worker, a left-leaning movement founded by Dorothy Day and Peter Marin in 1933), and distinguished educator. His images, published in newspapers, magazines, portfolios, and more than one hundred books, have reached countless numbers of people. He was, in the best sense of the word, a popular artist, one who communicated to a wide audience his unique vision while maintaining the highest technical and ethical standards.

A set of original publications will be featured along with a self-portrait of Eichenberg with many of the authors illustrated in this exhibition, thanks to a generous loan from a local collector. Additionally, this loan will include Eichenberg’s preparatory drawing, final print and original woodblock for the cover of The Long Loneliness: The Autobiography of Dorothy Day, along with the book itself, allowing visitors a glimpse into the artist’s process. The gallery will also present selections from Eichenberg’s 1972 work In Praise of Folly (Encomium Moriae) from its permanent collection.

Gallery hours are Monday through Friday, 11 am to 4 pm, and Saturday and Sunday, 1-5 pm. Free and open to the public, the Fine Arts Gallery is housed in Cohen Memorial Hall, 1220 21st Avenue South, on the western edge of the Peabody College campus. Parking is available in Lot 95 outside Cohen Hall, off 21st Avenue South on the Peabody campus and across from Medical Center East.

Posted by vrcvanderbilt on January 13, 2014 in Events, Fine Arts Gallery, HART, VRC

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Chris Strasbaugh Awarded 2013 VRAF Project Grant

Chris Strasbaugh, director of the Visual Resources Center in Vanderbilt’s History of Art department, has received one of two 2013 Visual Resources Association Foundation (VRAF) grants recently awarded by the Board of Directors. The amount of the award is $1500.

Strasbaugh and his colleagues plan to continue their development of the open source DIMLI: Digital Image Management Library, a web-based application written from the ground up using PHP and MySQL to interact with visual resources relational databases. The grant will be used to build a customizable data mapping application and migration tool, which will have the ability to map flat csv files to database tables, complete with templates for Archivision, Scholars Resource, VRA Core, Dublin Core, and others. In addition, a bulk download function will be built into the DAMS. Included in this work will be the necessary software development and documentation provided by an impressive team at Vanderbilt University. A full suite of videos created to highlight DIMLI features and assist new users is available here.

“The VRA Foundation began the Project Grant award program in 2011,” said Chairperson Liz Gushee, “and over the years, we’ve been delighted to see the popularity of the program grow and have been impressed by both the quality of applications and the diversity of project types. The discussion this year was particularly lively, and the Board is pleased to support two projects which aim to provide useful tools for any practitioner who works with visual resources or cultural heritage materials.”

Posted by vrcvanderbilt on December 16, 2013 in HART, Technology, VRC

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Mireille Lee Awarded Visiting Senior Fellowship at CASVA

Mireille M. Lee, assistant professor of the history of art, has been awarded a Visiting Senior Fellowship at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (CASVA). Founded in 1979 and housed in the National Gallery of Art’s East Building, CASVA is a research institute that fosters study of the production, use, and cultural meaning of art, artifacts, architecture, urbanism, photography, and film worldwide from prehistoric times to the present. Lee will relocate to Washington, DC, for two months this summer to pursue her research on ancient Greek mirrors.

Posted by vrcvanderbilt on December 9, 2013 in HART, VRC

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Rebecca VanDiver Featured in Frist Lecture Series on December 2

In partnership with Vanderbilt University’s Office of Community, Neighborhood, and Government Relations, “Food for Thought: Visualizing America through Art by African American Artists and Norman Rockwell” is a three-part lecture series held at the Frist Center for the Visual Arts and presented by Vanderbilt professors who are exploring issues about what it means to be an American today.

In the second part of the series on Tuesday, December 2, Rebecca VanDiver, assistant professor of the history of art, and other panelists addressed The Role of Art in Pop Culture Through the Works of Norman Rockwell and 30 Americans, including the rise of marketing and advertising and their influence on American art. A video of the panel discussion is available here.

This series provides the community at large with an opportunity to build challenging intellectual connections to the current exhibitions at the Frist, 30 Americans and American Chronicles: The Art of Norman Rockwell.

*Kehinde Wiley. Equestrian Portrait of the Count Duke Olivares, 2005. Oil on canvas, 108 x 108 inches. Rubell Family Collection, Miami. © Kehinde Wiley.

Posted by vrcvanderbilt on December 2, 2013 in HART, HART in Nashville, Lectures, VRC

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Free Coffee Available in the VRC Now Through Final Exams

As the fall semester comes to a close, the Visual Resources Center invites students, faculty, and staff to join us for a free cup of coffee—or two or three—in Cohen 134. Coffee will be available throughout the day for the next three weeks, beginning Monday, December 2. Pour yourself a cup and dash to class or stay for a while and review images streaming across the big screen at the end of our large study table or simply sit down and take some time to relax and enjoy a cup of java. The VRC is open weekdays from 7:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m.

Posted by vrcvanderbilt on December 2, 2013 in HART, VRC

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Elizabeth Moodey Presents Paper on Unpublished Prayerbook

Elizabeth Moodey, assistant professor of history of art, presented a paper at an Index of Christian Art conference held October 25-26 at Princeton University. The conference, entitled Manuscripta Illuminata: Approaches to Understanding Medieval & Renaissance Manuscripts, focused on illuminated manuscripts and included papers on books ranging from impressive, heavily gilded Ottonian service books to a blockbook narrative version of the Song of Songs.

Moodey’s paper, Variations on Grisaille in a newly acquired Prayerbook (Princeton MS. 223), explored an unpublished prayerbook painted in shades of gray, setting it in the context of better-known grisailles like the Miracles de Notre-Dame leaf from a manuscript made for Philip the Good, now in the Getty Museum. The prayerbook, which was acquired by Princeton this spring, was made for a woman probably in late 15th century Bruges, and includes a portrait of her and her children.

Moodey teaches the history of illuminated manuscripts, the culture of the Burgundian court, and the art of medieval Europe, with an emphasis on materials and technique and questions of patronage. Her book, Illuminated Crusader Histories for Philip the Good of Burgundy (Brepols Publishers, 2012), examines the varieties of history writing and the visual and literary projects initiated at the duke’s court before and after the fall of Constantinople in 1453.

Posted by vrcvanderbilt on November 14, 2013 in Events, HART, VRC

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Kevin Murphy to Participate in “Soundscapes” Conference

The rise of digital media over the last few decades has dramatically changed the way in which we make and consume sound within the contexts of our everyday lives.

Whether we play ongoing music streams at home, freely reassemble audible objects with the help of our computers, listen to a diverse range of prerecorded sounds on the move, or find ourselves subjected to continuous sound in every arena of the public sphere, the advent of digital media has led to an unprecedented mobilization of sound as much as it has raised fundamental questions about existing structures of attention.

Kevin Murphy, chair of the department of history of art, is among the respondents at a two-day conference (November 14-15) on the art of listening: Soundscapes: Hearing in the Age of Digital Media. Murphy will respond to “Ubiquitous Listening and Distributed Subjectivity” delivered by Anahid Kassabin, School of Music, University of Liverpool, on November 14 at 10 a.m. in the First Amendment Center.

While some critics argue that listeners have greater freedom and autonomy today than ever before, others think that today’s digital soundscapes overwhelm and stupefy the human ear. Either way, listening today is not what it used to be. Recent media changes have reshaped how we attend to sound and music, and we need new vocabularies to study and evaluate how those changes have altered our sense of hearing and the importance of sound in contemporary art, entertainment, politics, and knowledge production.

The conference includes a tour of Ocean Way Nashville Recording Studio. Cosponsored by the Curb Center for Art, Enterprise, and Public Policy and the Max Kade Center for European and German Studies, the conference will be held at the First Amendment Center, 1207 18th Avenue South (Thursday, November 14), and the Curb Center, 1801 Edgehill Avenue (Friday, November 15).

Posted by vrcvanderbilt on November 13, 2013 in Events, HART, Lectures, VRC

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Hilary Gopnik to Deliver AIA Lecture on November 5

Hilary Gopnik, co-director of the Naxçivan Archaeological Project at Emory University, will deliver a lecture about Alexander the Great in the far reaches of his empire on Tuesday, November 5, at 7 p.m. in the Nashville Parthenon at Centennial Park. Her lecture, entitled On the Edge of Alexander’s World: The Unfinished Palace at Oğlanqala, Azerbaijan, will take us to the remote location where she excavates a fascinating structure linking the Greek world to the lands explored by Alexander.

Gopnik teaches in the Department of Middle Eastern and South Asian Studies and the Ancient Mediterranean Studies Program at Emory, and holds degrees from the University of Toronto (Ph.D. and M.A.) and McGill University (B.A.). Her fields of research are Near Eastern and Greek archaeology, particularly Iran and the Caucasus, and the Medes and Persians.

Her doctoral research centered on Godin Tepe, one of the only archaeological sites that can be firmly identified with the Medes of Iran (8th to 6th centuries BCE). She recently co-authored the final publication of that site: On the High Road: The History of Godin Tepe, Iran.

Since 2008 Gopnik has shifted her archaeological focus from Iran northward to Azerbaijan, where she is the co-director of excavations at the Iron Age (8th to 1st centuries BCE) citadel site of Oğlanqala. In the summer of 2013 this project began work at the nearby site of Qizqala, which has settlement occupation lasting for some 2,000 years from the Bronze Age through the Iron Age.

Free and open to the public, Gopnik’s lecture is sponsored by the Nashville Society of the Archaeological Institute of America and Vanderbilt’s department of classical studies. Those who plan to attend the lecture are encouraged to call the Nashville Parthenon at 615.862.8431 to reserve a seat.

Posted by vrcvanderbilt on November 1, 2013 in HART, Lectures, VRC

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Amy McNair to Deliver Goldberg Lecture on November 7

Amy McNair, professor of Chinese art, Kress Foundation Department of Art History, University of Kansas, will present the Norman L. and Roselea J. Goldberg Lecture in Art History on Thursday, November 7, at 4:10 p.m. in 203 Cohen Hall. Her lecture is entitled “Heroic Abandon: The 1300-Year Life of Yan Zhenqing’s Imperial Commissioner Liu Letter.”

Profoundly interested in the Chinese letter writing culture, McNair is the preeminent scholar in Tang dynasty calligraphy. In the history of Chinese calligraphy, few are more famous than the eighth-century statesman Yan Zhenqing (709-785). McNair’s lecture will focus on the Imperial Commissioner Liu Letter by Yan Zhenqing, now in the National Palace Museum, Taipei.

“This brief letter, which comments on military actions in 775, is exemplary not only for its extraordinary appearance—highly gestural cursive-script characters on blue sutra paper—and the reputation of its author, a renowned loyalist statesman, scholar and aristocrat,” wrote McNair, “but also for the rich documentation of its nearly 1300-year life in the hands of numerous important collectors and the manifold responses by critics and artists.”

Among her publications are The Upright Brush: Yan Zhenqing’s Calligraphy and Song Literati Politics (Honolulu, University of Hawaii Press, 1998), where McNair argues for the political rather than purely aesthetic basis for Yan Zhenqing’s artistic reputation. She shows how his prominent position was made for him in the eleventh century “by a handful of influential men who sought to advance their own position by associating themselves with Yan’s reputation for uprightness,” wrote McNair. “Equating style with personality, they adopted Yan’s calligraphic style as a way to clothe themselves in his persona.”

Donors of Longmen: Faith, Politics, and Patronage in Medieval Chinese Buddhist Sculpture (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2007), considered the definitive work on Longmen, is the first work in a Western language to recreate the history of the Longmen Grottoes, one of China’s major stone sculpture repositories. Here McNair provides a rich and detailed examination of “the dynamics of faith, politics, and money” at Longmen, beginning with the inception of the site at Guyang Grotto in 493 and concluding with the last major dated project, the forty-eight Amitabhas added to the Great Vairocana Image Shrine in 730.

At the University of Kansas since 1992, McNair (B.A., University of Oregon; M.A., University of Washington; and Ph.D., University of Chicago) has taught such courses as Introduction to Asian Art, Art and Culture of China, Early Chinese Art, Medieval Chinese Art, Chinese Sculpture, Chinese Calligraphy, Chinese Painting, and Classical Chinese Art Texts. Her graduate seminars examine varied topics: Chinese Sculpture: Longmen Cave Shrines, Literary Themes in Chinese Art, History of Calligraphy, Mortuary Art in Early China, Art of the Tang Dynasty, Art of Northern and Southern Dynasties, Early Chinese Theories of Art, and Politics and Patronage in Chinese Art.

McNair has won many national and international fellowships and honors and is the recipient of the National Endowment for the Humanities Research Fellowship. Her topic, “Lives of the Imperial Painters: Chinese Biographies in Translation,” is a translation of the twelfth-century Catalogue of the Imperial Painting Collection in the Proclaiming Harmony Era.

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

Posted by vrcvanderbilt on October 29, 2013 in HART, Lectures, VRC

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