Curtain-sacks, when depicted in certain contexts, such as scenes of birth and death and most frequently Annunciations, as in Rogier van der Weyden's Columba Annunciation (Munich), symbolize the Incarnation. Created by 1415 in Franco-Flemish circles, the symbol was used by numerous 15th-century Netherlandish, German, and French artists. That the curtain-sack was endowed with incarnational significance followed from its physical likeness to late medieval representations of the womb as well as to the abomasum of ruminants and curd-sacks. If womb-like in appearance, then conception could be imagined as analogically occurring within it. The embryogenic processes then invoked were Aristotelian. Central was a cheese analogy which likened foetal formation to curdling. Both the abomasum and curd-sacks stored curds and the former was even used to manufacture them. Through these associations, the curtain-sack became a potent iconographic symbol.
This paper considers Benozzo Gozzoli's frescoes of the life of Saint Augustine in San Gimignano in terms of their iconographic, stylistic and historic significance. It proposes how the cycle reveals the Quattrocento's conception of Augustine during a period of intense religious reform, synthesizing a rich hagiographic tradition with the image of the teologian that the Order sought to promote at the time. The importance of the murals in Benozzo's own stylistic development as well as their contributions to Renaissance narrative are assessed. Finally, it reconstructs the history of the chapel's patronage through new documentary evidence. The donor's involvement with the Augustinian Osservanza suggests that the chapel may constitute a unique instance of reform iconography.
A critical historical analysis of the Romantic period in Venice, that is in the 1800's, means to be sure dealing with an image of dreams and desire, a close but at the same time, ever so distant response to the problems of European society of the time, oriented in the perspectives of industrial positivism. But it also poses a more complicated and particular problem within the history of art at present busy tracing the historical and geographic guidelines of medieval Italian architecture - Romanesque, Gothic and Byzantine.
This article investigates an example of the practice of three artists, Delacroix in Le Lever (Collection Maxime Citroen, Paris), Cézanne in Interior with Nude (Barnes Foundation, Merion Penn.), and Picasso in Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (Museum of Modern Art, New York), for purpose of exploring a theory of genres built upon artists' use of other artists' work. Such a theory would engender a model of style in which style would emerge as genre, that is the pattern of sequence of constancy and change of a motif grounded in the social nexus the motivates the particular blend. It presents a view of the artist as a conservator, rather than a radical innovator, whose ability to vary inherited motifs preserves what is constitutive of a culture.
The article consists of two main parts. The first is a proposal for improvement of Panofsky's iconographic theory. His famous three-level scheme is changed into a scheme of four levels of meaning in works of art. This enables us to define the terms Iconography and Iconology much better. The revised "scheme of Panofsky" is exemplified at the case of Vermeer's Woman Holding a Balance (National Gallery of Art, Washington). The second part of this paper is an introduction to the ICONCLASS iconographic documentation and research system. In recent years, the theory of iconography has found some renewed interest among scholars working in the field of (computerized) iconographic documentation. The ICONCLASS system, with its bibliography and alphabetical index, solves many iconographic documentation problems, by combining several layers of meaning; working with ICONCLASS means working along the lines of the revised "scheme of Panofsky". By the use of a particular painting representing the Choice of Moses, an example is given of how the system works.