Explore the vast range of titles available.

Scientific studies of works of art are usually limited by severe sampling restrictions. The identification of organic colorants, a class of compounds relevant for attribution and provenance studies, is further complicated by the low concentrations at which these compounds are used and by the interference of the protein-, gum-, or oil-binding media present in pigment and glaze samples. Surface-enhanced resonance Raman scattering (SERRS) was successfully used to identify natural organic colorants in archaeological objects, polychrome sculptures, and paintings from samples smaller than 25 μm in diameter. The key factors in achieving the necessary sensitivity were a highly active stabilized silver colloid, obtained by the reproducible microwave-supported reduction of silver sulfate with glucose and sodium citrate, and a non-extractive hydrolysis sample treatment procedure that maximizes dye adsorption on the colloid. Among the examples presented are the earliest so far found occurrence of madder lake (in a 4,000 years old Egyptian object dating to the Middle Kingdom period), and the earliest known occurrence in Europe of the South Asian dyestuff lac (in the Morgan Madonna, a 12th century polychrome sculpture from Auvergne, France).

Expanding the range of canonical sources will provide better answers to familiar historical questions as well as change the very nature of the questions people are able to pose and the kind of knowledge humans are able to acquire about the past. Historians can learn a great deal both from the objects with which people interact every day and from the insights that other disciplines bring to their study.

Monroe looks closely at the reception of African sculpture in the interwar period in order to reassess what has been a thorny theoretical problem among cultural anthropologists and art historians: the complex and vexed capacity to appreciate so-called \"traditional\" objects from Africa, Oceania, and the Americas as art in the Western sense. He notes that what can seem from one angle to be a condescending emphasis on the Western connoisseur's \"eye\" in judging the value of exotic objects can seem from another to be a powerful means of celebrating the creative achievements of peoples and cultures previously written off in racist terms.

The French state expropriated an enormous quantity of cultural property from across Europe during the Wars of the Revolution and Napoleon, but much was returned in 1815 after the fall of the Empire. This article examines contemporary attitudes to the displacement of works of art, antiquities, scientific specimens, and rare books. The seizures were controversial: since they occurred at a time when plundering the vanquished was already considered questionable behaviour, they attracted opposition and needed to be justified. The article identifies the resulting repertoire of attitudes, arguing that this repertoire evolved with changing circumstances and was more varied than hitherto maintained. By situating this repertoire in a larger historical context, the article also reassesses the extent to which attitudes were derivative and innovative. It contends that the disputation as a whole did not amount to a decisive rupture in the treatment of foreign cultural property during wartime, but that it was nevertheless remarkable in two respects: concepts from hitherto unrelated subjects were applied to considerations about cultural property; and the perceived conditions under which cultural property could be legitimately transferred were revised.

The Czech Group of Fine Artists published their journal, Umělecký měsíčník (Art Monthly, 1911-1914) to justify their abstraction and their interest in French cubism in response to criticism that denigrated their work as incomprehensible and foreign. In this article, Naomi Hume argues that the Group's strategy was fundamentally at odds with how avantgardes have been understood to operate in scholarship on modernism. Rather than asserting a break with the past, the Group applied new Viennese art historical approaches—particularly those of Alois Riegl, Max Dvořák, and Vincenc Kramář—to draw parallels between their work and prior art objects that departed from mimesis. They equated their radical style with what Riegl called anachronisms in art's development, moments when an independent will to form emerges from the mainstream. By bringing French cubist ideas into dialogue with the inherent spirituality of their own national tradition, the Group saw themselves as reinvigorating Czech art.

This article reassesses Charles Baudelaire's stance toward photography and investigates how the subject of photography is treated by him poetically. Reading the prose poems \"Les Fenêtres\" and \"Mademoiselle Bistouri,\" it argues that Baudelaire was highly concerned with the question of reading images and discusses the importance of captions in the age of technological reproducibility, with reference to Walter Benjamin's essay on photography. The article further discusses Benjamin's method. Investigating his use of photographic imagery, it shows that the question of reading images in Benjamin's writings is laid out both in terms of photography and in terms of allegory.

A commitment to providing students with multiple learning venues is the foundation of the Art Education program at the University of Missouri. Integral to the curriculum is the belief that all students, university and K-12 alike, should have the opportunity to view original works of art. Having access to museums at an early age sets the tone for further exploration of one's culture by developing skills to interpret visual language. Paris and Hapgood (2002) described museums as informal learning environments where objects and experiences stimulate a curiosity that can be extended into the classroom and beyond. With this in mind, the University of Missouri Art Education Program and Museum of Art and Archeology collaboratively created the Museum Partnership Program to provide preservice art teachers with museum experiences and training for connecting museums and their resources in their future classrooms. Rather than relying on secondary sources, such as printed and web-based art reproductions, this program allows preservice art teachers to experience the energizing effect of teaching from primary sources, such as real artworks in an authentic setting, and the museum itself. In this article, the authors describe their vision for art education/museum collaboration and explain how this program has affected their future art teachers as well as the young students at a local elementary school. (Contains 5 figures.)

The frequent distinction made between scientific and purely amateur collections misrepresents the specificity of the field of eighteenth-century natural history. This paper argues that the extent and the boundaries of a scientific field can be determined only within the framework of concrete historical constellations of institutions, protagonists, practices and objects. By tracing the circulation of shells in eighteenth-century France, Paris in particular, between about 1735 and 1780, it becomes evident which individuals or groups actually came into contact with these shells; in what practices of collecting, describing and classification they were involved; and in what spaces they were displayed. Thus the contours of a constellation emerge which differ considerably from those drawn hitherto.

This essay examines Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s changing efforts to grapple with his unprecedented celebrity through each of his major autobiographical texts (the Confessions, the Dialogues, and the Rêveries du promeneur solitaire). It argues that Rousseau advocates a new, if ultimately untenable, model of celebrity that emphasizes the authenticity of the author’s embodied person. With this new model, Rousseau suggests that his person must be read along with his texts. Highlighting the author’s fraught attempts to manage his celebrity through his autobiographical texts, the essay explores the inherent slippages between Rousseau’s embodied person, textual representation, and celebrity persona.

What is the commitment of left-leaning artists and intellectuals in a context where the legitimacy of politics and party activism is being called into question? The analysis of the case of the French directors who have made films dealing with social issues in the 1990s–2000s shows the complexity of the boundaries between art and politics and of the possible modes of commitment through their works and/or their name. Some directors who have made one or several films dealing with the working classes in France in this period have been associated with the label \"social cinema\" by the critic, as well as social scientists or \"anti-globalization\" activists. Despite the differences in their social and professional backgrounds, they all have in common the rejection of this label, opposing \"social cinema\" to artistic recognition and carefully distinguishing their artwork from commitment. In order to stabilize their careers and meet professional success, they often have to move from working class issues to more valued topics and from a realistic aesthetic to a more distinguished one. They mostly commit their names for the defence of the \"independence of cinema\" and for humanitarian causes, rather for more overtly political or partisan issues. More generally, this case study illustrates the forms and repertoires of commitment open to artists and intellectuals in the 1990s–2000s, showing how they try to use their professional skills and resources (including their notoriety) in the service of certain causes without jeopardizing their artistic autonomy, by distancing themselves both from partisan politics and from \"commercial cinema.\"