Great Reads: Outstanding Faculty Research & Publications
A selection of works, recently published and coming soon, by FSU Art History faculty:
Michael Carrasco: Grants & publications on Maya Imagery and the Emergence of Mesoamerican Writing
Professor Michael Carrasco has two publications forthcoming this spring: the epilogue to the book Maya Imagery, Architecture, and Activity: Space and Spatial Analysis in Art History and “Diphrastic Kennings on the Cascajal Block and the Emergence of Mesoamerican Writing” in the Cambridge Archaeological Journal. Dr. Carrasco will also present papers this year on his ongoing collaborative NEH project The Mesoamerican Corpus of Formative Period Art and Writing. This project – the only NEH Digital Humanities Start-Up Grant to be awarded to a Florida researcher in 2014 – investigates the critical role of Olmec art in the invention of writing in the Americas, integrating newly discovered material into a centralized database and developing a suite of analytic, mobile-accessible digital tools for researchers in the field. In addition to these projects, with the support of a COFRS grant received this spring, in the summer Dr. Carrasco will finish portions of his forthcoming book From the Stone Painter’s Brush: An Anthology, Commentary, and Analysis of Classic Maya Literature.
Jack Freiberg: Bramante’s Tempietto, the Roman Renaissance, and the Spanish Crown
The Tempietto, the embodiment of the Renaissance mastery of classical architecture and its Christian reinvention, was also the preeminent commission of the Catholic kings, Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabel of Castile, in papal Rome. Professor Freiberg’s groundbreaking book situates Bramante’s time-honored memorial dedicated to Saint Peter and the origins of the Roman Catholic Church at the center of a coordinated program of the arts exalting Spain’s leadership in the quest for Christian hegemony. The innovations in form and iconography that made the Tempietto an authoritative model for Western architecture were fortified in legacy monuments created by the popes in Rome and the kings in Spain from the later Renaissance to the present day. New photographs expressly taken for this study capture comprehensive views and focused details of this exemplar of Renaissance art and statecraft.
Published by Cambridge University Press
November 2014
Adam Jolles: The Curatorial Avant-Garde: Surrealism and Exhibition Practice in France, 1925–1941
In The Curatorial Avant-Garde, Professor Jolles demonstrates the surrealists’ radical transformation of the ways in which spectators encountered works of art between the wars. From their introduction in Paris in 1925, surrealist exhibitions dissolved the conventional boundaries between visual media, language, and the space of public display. This intrusion—by a group of amateur curators, with neither formal training nor professional experience in museums or galleries—ultimately altered the way in which surrealists made, displayed, and promoted their own art. Dr. Jolles’s monograph was featured in the June 2014 ARTnews article “14 New Art-History Books to Change Your Mind.”
Published by Penn State University Press
April 2014
Lynn Jones (ed.): Byzantine Images and their Afterlives: Essays in honor of Annemarie Weyl Carr
Professor Lynn Jones has edited a new anthology of essays, Byzantine Images and their Afterlives: Essays in honor of Annemarie Weyl Carr. The twelve papers written for this volume reflect the wide scope of Annemarie Weyl Carr’s interests and the equally wide impact of her work. The concepts linking the essays include the examination of form and meaning, the relationship between original and copy and cultural identity in medieval art and architecture.
Published by Ashgate Publishing
June 2014
Stephanie Leitch: The Art of Observation in the Early Modern Print (1500–1700)
The Art of Observation in the Early Modern Print (1500–1700) was awarded a Committee on Faculty Research Support (COFRS) grant for the summer of 2014 by the Council on Research and Creativity at FSU. Professor Leitch’s book will examine how first-hand observations came to be recorded in images in several printed genres that claimed to reproduce unmediated experience with the world. Prints in these diverse genres helped cue observations, calibrate sightings and thus sharpen visual acuity. These texts delivered strategies for observing human, terrestrial and cosmographic phenomena through images. In arguing for the kinship of visual tactics found in epistemic genres such as cosmography and natural history, as well as how-to texts like physiognomies and artists’ manuals, this book aims to show how images helped elevate the testimony of the firsthand observer to a status where it could compete with ancient wisdom. The paradoxically non-naturalistic formal properties that characterized these images served the twin goals of recording empirical experience and organizing that data into disciplinary knowledge.
(forthcoming)
Paul Niell: Urban Space as Heritage in Late Colonial Cuba: Classicism and Dissonance on the Plaza de Armas of Havana, 1754-1828
Professor Niell’s Urban Space as Heritage in Late Colonial Cuba was published in May 2015. According to national legend, Havana, Cuba, was founded under the shade of a ceiba tree whose branches sheltered the island’s first Catholic mass and meeting of the town council (cabildo) in 1519. The founding site was first memorialized in 1754 by the erection of a baroque monument in Havana’s central Plaza de Armas, which was reconfigured in 1828 by the addition of a neoclassical work, El Templete. Viewing the transformation of the Plaza de Armas from new perspectives in heritage studies, Professor Niell investigates how late colonial Cuban society narrated Havana’s founding to valorize Spanish imperial power and used the monuments to underpin a local sense of place and cultural authenticity, civic achievement, and social order. In the spring of 2015 Professor Niell also received a Franklin Grant from the American Philosophical Society and a Committee on Faculty Research Support (COFRS) grant from the Council on Research and Creativity at FSU to support research on his next book project, “Landscapes of Reform in Nineteenth-Century Puerto Rico.”
Published by the University of Texas Press
May 2015
Robert Neuman: Baroque and Rococo Art and Architecture
Professor Neuman’s Baroque and Rococo Art and Architecture provides the first in-depth history of one of the great periods of Western art, spanning the years 1585 to 1785. The text treats the major media: painting, sculpture, drawings, prints and architecture as well as gardens, furniture, tapestries, costume, jewelry and ceramics. All of these are treated in terms of their original function and patronage with emphasis on the social, political and cultural context. The book contains biographies of the leading creative figures of the time, from Caravaggio and Rembrandt to Watteau and Hogarth. Significantly, Neuman offers the fullest account to date of female artists and the representation of women and families in art. Additionally, drawing from recent scholarship, the text explores such fields as Spanish polychrome sculpture and Viceregal American painting.
Published by Pearson Publishing
October 2012