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13 Iconography of the belly: eighteenth-century satirical prints Barbara Stentz If the body is both polysemous and ambivalent, it also serves more widely as ‘a framework for both knowledge and description because its different metaphorical levels were capable of describing the entire world, visible and invisible’.1 Countless studies have examined the social, political, cultural, scientific, cultural and/or private dimensions of the body, its gesturality and other forms of expression and even its fluids. The rhetorical expressivity of the face and hands, for
An ambiguous national iconography: Family Portrait 6 A critical shibboleth concerning Jennings’ work holds that his best or most accomplished films were produced during the war years. Reflecting this position Lindsay Anderson opened his well-known reap praisal of Jennings’ career with the argument that the war ‘fertilised [Jennings’] talent and created the conditions in which his best work was produced’.1 In the same vein another critic has insisted that ‘war unmis takably brought out the best in Jennings’.2 Within the terms of such assessments Jennings’ pre
Iconography of a prison massacre: drawings by Peruvian Shining Path war survivors Anouk Guiné In Peru, many artists and their works are still under the strict surveillance of mainstream art and political institutions. The hostile climate is the product of a highly polarised country whose state ideological apparatuses are controlled by fierce opponents of the Partido Comunista del Perú (PCP, Communist Party of Peru), also known as Sendero Luminoso (SL, Shining Path). In 1963 after the Sino-Soviet split, the PCP began preparing a ‘proletarian revolution’. The
Since the sixteenth century, artistic anatomy – a branch of medical science subordinated to the Fine Arts – has understood itself as a comparative investigation halfway between forensic dissection and the analysis of classical art and live bodies. Its teaching was first instituted in Italy by the 1802 curriculum of the national Fine Arts academies, but underwent a drastic transformation at the turn of the century, as the rise of photography brought about both a new aesthetics of vision and an increase in the precision of iconographic documentation. In this article I will attempt to provide a history of the teaching of this discipline at the close of the nineteenth century within the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera in Milan, with a focus on its ties to contemporary French practices. Drawing on archival materials including lesson plans, letters and notes from the classes of the three medical doctors who subsequently held the chair (Gaetano Strambio, Alessandro Lanzillotti-Buonsanti and Carlo Biaggi), I will argue that the deep connections between their teaching of the discipline and their work at the city hospital reveal a hybrid approach, with the modern drive towards live-body study unable to wholly supplant the central role still granted to corpses in the grammar of the visual arts.
There are many factors at work in the iconography of human remains. Some of those frequently discussed are aesthetic criteria, iconographic traditions and specific contingencies, whether political (for example in war paintings), symbolic (essential for transi images) or cultural. There is, however, one factor that is rarely mentioned, despite its centrality: the regime of value associated with corpses. Christ’s body is not painted in the same way as that of a departed relative or that used in a human dissection. Artists choose a suitable iconography depending on how the remains are perceived. This criterion became absolutely crucial in contexts such as nineteenth-century France, when attitudes to corpses underwent major changes.
independence in the post-Second World War period cartoonists reappropriated and recrafted imperialist imagery to convey new meanings. 1 The political cartoons drawn during the 1956 Suez Crisis provide a rich snapshot of this emerging iconography of decolonisation. While historians continue to debate the long-term implications of the crisis, at the time it was viewed as the final gasp of the British and French empires in the Middle East. 2
The John Rylands Library is an outstanding example of neo-Gothic architecture, and is without parallel in Britain as a memorial library. This article situates the Library‘s foundation at the close of the nineteenth century within the economic and cultural development of Manchester, the worlds first industrial city, and within wider trends in library history. Enriqueta Rylands‘s aims in establishing the Library are analysed, as well as her influence on the design and construction of the building. The article includes a detailed examination of the iconography of the building and the innovative use of building services technology designed to protect the remarkable collections that were amassed by Mrs Rylands. Later developments are also treated, including the most recent ‘Unlocking the Rylands’ project, 2000-07.
: Routledge ), pp. 153 – 68 . Briggs , L. ( 2003 ), ‘ Mother, Child, Race, Nation: The Visual Iconography of Rescue and the Politics of Transnational and Transracial Adoption ’, Gender & History , 15 : 2 , 179 – 200 . Burman , E
. Even when humanitarians rely on stock iconographies of suffering, they always do so in light of specific aims and in a particular context coloured by a background culture. For example, in ‘The Limits of Exposure’, Kevin Grant captures how the moral milieu of reformers and their audience colours the content and mode of disseminating images. He focuses on how gender norms affected when and how sexual violence was or was not portrayed in photographs and narratives by the Congo