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Trudi Abrams, California State University, Northridge
Sandra Esslinger, Mt. San Antonio College
Picturing the Healthy Body: The Eugenics Movement in the Early 20th Century
An ideal perspective that fostered changes in human reproduction, the eugenics movement promoted the concept that better breeding could forward public health and lead to an improved public body or nation. Public health was encouraged in many different ways—through the advocacy of athletics, good diet, and eugenics.
A “scientific” and political movement that appealed to the educated populace, eugenics championed the “best” and “brightest” to reproduce while discouraging those deemed as “unfit” genetically. Eugenicists envisioned a white upper- and middle-class society as the ideal and felt they had been given the right to pass judgment on others in the name of a “progressive” project that contributed to public good. Eugenics arose at the turn of the century in Western Europe and America and was instrumental in the politics and policies of many western nations.
Previously, much theoretical debate has been centered on a post-structural study of groups marginalized in society. The “scientific” criteria for judging genetic fitness necessitated, in part, a visual assessment; thus, visual culture was a major factor in constructing the ideal healthy body. We will look at images that advance or picture the “desired” or what would be considered the eugenic ideal.
Our paper will investigate the center upon which the “other” has been defined. Because the eugenics movement coincided with many depictions of both women and men within the visual field, we will explore images from what can be considered both popular culture and “high” art. In particular we will address the theoretical ideas and the visual images that constituted the eugenicist program during the regimes of power of Theodore Roosevelt and examine its extreme implications under Adolf Hitler.
Eunice Howe, University of Southern California
Composing a City: Guidebook Authors and Renaissance Rome
Modern scholars frequently turn to guidebooks for insights into the topography and landmarks of Renaissance Rome. The authors of these guidebooks composed vivid accounts of the city--whether elaborate itineraries, descriptions of monuments, legendary tales or reconstructions of the ancient capital. It has been assumed that the texts were intended to be accurate and coherent, conveying up-to-date information in an accessible form.
These accounts were consulted by contemporary travelers who sought meaningful encounters with the famous city. But there were as many ways to visit Rome as there were reasons to do so. By the mid-sixteenth century, pilgrims, scholars, artists and antiquarians flocked to the city--along with curious laypeople--and each required a particular genre of travel narrative. Still others depended on travel literature to lead them to celebrated monuments that they would never see, but that they would recreate in their imaginations.
Let it be said that guidebook authors have never been impartial observers. Some were humanist scholars with a fervent investment in the ancient city. Others were writers who aimed at a wide audience, popularizing an established literary form. Yet others were beholden to patrons or popes.
The demand for printed guidebooks resulted in their steady production. One type did not supplant another, but rather they coexisted, sometimes in competition. In the mid-fifteenth century, Flavio Biondo wrote a systematic study of Roman monuments. Francesco Albertini wrote a first-hand account of the city of Julius II, and, in the mid-sixteenth century, Andrea Palladio composed companion guides to Christian and ancient Rome. We shall see that these well-known authors offered contradictory views, and yet they had the shared objective of stabilizing a city that was in flux.
Margarita Nieto, California State University, Northridge
Unraveling a Knot in the Infinite Text: Vladimir Cora's Contemporary Paintings of "The Last Supper" and Leonardo da Vinci
During the last two years, the contemporary Mexican painter, Vladimir Cora has painted five versions of "The Last Supper," utilizing Leonardo Da Vinci's fresco as a model.
Beginning with an encaustic rendering of the twelve apostles, and then continuing to explore interpretations of the "Last Supper" ("La última asamblea") which break with the canonic aspects of that discourse, Cora is, in his own words, experimenting with the authority that Leonardo created in his masterpiece. He is questioning through these works, the concept that a masterpiece in and of itself, in breaking with pre-established canons, becomes a canonic work itself.
Yet, these renderings remain faithful to Leonardo's fresco in composition and mood by recapitulating the narrative that Leonardo chose to depict, particularly the moment in which Christ utters the words, "One of you is about to betray me." That fidelity, despite research into the multitude of works which have depicted this discourse, encourages a probe into the meaning and being-ness of this narrative in our time.
This paper then will focus on the narrative aspects that Cora's work depicts while utilizing the Leonardo work as a basis for the study. Thus the underlying construct of Derrida's theory of the infinite text and its relationship to the study of this particular narrative.
Vanessa Walker Oakes, University of California, Los Angeles
The Battered Body and the Enlightened Spirit: The Role of Physical Suffering in the Martyrdom Cycle at Santo Stefano Rotondo, Rome
For the modern viewer, the first steps around the ambulatory at Santo Stefano Rotondo in Rome seem more the stuff of horror films than of spiritual edification. Decorated with a series of thirty-one scenes representing the martyrdoms of Early Christian saints by Nicolò Circignani in 1582, the walls were described by one twentieth-century art historian as “the most repugnant things that the Mannerists ever created, due nearly as much to their crude and dashed-off manner as to their bloodthirsty character.” For the modern viewer they continue to incite disgust, revulsion, and characterization as “crass paintings of torture.” At the time of their completion in August 1582, however, the frescoes were received positively. According to the diary of Michele Laurentano who commissioned the work, the frescoes caused many who saw them to weep in empathy, so struck were they by the images.
In a recent article, Leslie Korrick, attempting to account for this changing reception by an analysis of the meaning of style, has argued that the cycle was successful as visual instruction in Jesuit memory systems. She proposes that the style, perceived by many modern scholars as deficient, reflects a deliberate choice to avoid any display of artistic virtuosity that might detract from the devotional focus of the viewer. Circignani, according to Korrick, should be regarded as a master of the Jesuit style, rather than as an unaccomplished Mannerist.
If one attends, however, both to the content of the images and to the affective and corporeal charge of the responses, whether early modern or contemporary, one may posit another possible explanation for the changing reception of the frescoes. The sources for this varied response may be found not only in the abstract, intellectual realm of Jesuit mnemonic theory, but also in a different understanding of the role of the body, and of physical suffering, in spiritual enlightenment. Recent research in history, anthropology, and psychology has stressed that the conception of the body and the meaning given to bodily sensation and experience change with the times.
Twentieth-century revulsion caused by the frescoes results from a characteristically modern separation of body and mind in spiritual practice that is antithetical to the Counter Reformation understanding of the role of somatic experience, including violence and suffering, in devotional and spiritual awakening. There was a time when suffering was beautiful.
Nancy Troy, University of Southern California
(Re)Making Mondrian
When Piet Mondrian died in New York City on February 1, 1944, he left behind not only a series of recently completed paintings but also a number of unfinished works as well as an apartment/studio whose walls and furnishings were arranged as compositions that adumbrated the Dutch artist’s characteristic Neo-Plastic style. This paper addresses the problematic status of these latter works as they entered the discursive terrain of art history through the mechanisms of the art market. It traces the interventions of artists, conservators, academics, curators, dealers, and others who became implicated in the process of remaking certain works by Mondrian at the same time that they helped to secure his standing as a major figure in the history of modernist art. From this perspective, the history of Mondrian’s oeuvre as the work has circulated in the years since his death can be understood as a case study of how art historians (and their colleagues from across the institutional axes of the art world) contribute to the commodification of the objects upon which their research is focused.
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