The Medici Archive Project (MAP) is bringing together a distinguished panel of Renaissance specialists, including our Professor Geronimus, for a stimulating conversation about Sandro Botticelli’s rediscovered Man of Sorrows (private collection), as well as its broader context.
The event is scheduled on Monday, Jan. 24th, at 1pm ET. NB: Subscription is required for joining this and other MAP online lectures and events. Current and past students, however, will be sent a separate invitation to participate without charge, thanks to the generosity of MAP.
A Scholars’ Roundtable on Botticelli’s “Man of Sorrows”
With: Alessio Assonitis – Dennis Geronimus – Martin Kemp – Catherine Puglisi – Alexander Röstel – Robert Simon
On Monday, January 24 1pm New York / 6pm London / 7pm Rome
Botticelli’s Man of Sorrows, first displayed to the public in the Städel Museum’s 2009-10 exhibition “Botticelli: Likeness, Myth, Devotion,” has recently grabbed headlines in anticipation of its sale at auction on January 27, 2022. The sale’s outcome will determine whether it will be seen on a museum wall, or whether it will disappear from sight.
Stark and disquieting, Botticelli’s Man of Sorrows is a radical departure from the etherial forms and delicate palette of Botticelli’s hallmark style. Behind its unusual imagery are perhaps interpenetrating currents: local and peregrine, ancient and modern.
Does this agonizing, disruptive image reflect the artist’s personal crisis? Is it emblematic of social cataclysm? Such questions are especially challenging given the uncertainty around the work’s dating. Our scholars’ roundtable will explore the painting’s creation and meaning, and seek to place it in artistic, devotional and historic contexts.
To attend this event, you must be a member of Friends of the Medici Archive Project.
By Richard Kagan, Robert Lubar, and Edward J. Sullivan
Jonathan Brown was a pioneering art historian who brought the study of both Spanish and Viceregal Mexican art to wide public and academic attention with his teaching, voluminous writing and exhibition curating, from the 1960s until the present decade. He died at home in Princeton, New Jersey on January 17, 2022. Jonathan Brown was the son of Jean (Levy) Brown and Leonard Brown, well known collectors of Dada, Surrealist, Fluxus, and especially Abstract Expressionist art. He was born in Springfield, Massachusetts on July 15, 1939. As an undergraduate at Dartmouth College, he became interested in Spanish language and literature. His love of Spanish art was fostered by classes at the Universidad Complutense in Madrid, where he attended New York University’s junior year in Spain program in 1958-59. Brown received his PhD in art history in 1964 from Princeton where he taught in the Department of Art and Archaeology from 1965 to 1973. Jonathan Brown and Sandra Backer were married in 1966. Their house in Princeton, New Jersey, has been the family home for many years. Jonathan was recruited by NYU to be Director (1973-78) of the Institute of Fine Arts, the university’s graduate center for the study of art history and fine arts conservation. He remained at the Institute until his retirement in 2017, serving as the Caroll and Milton Petrie Professor of Fine Arts. Brown instructed several generations of advanced students in his field, many of whom went on to have prestigious careers as academics, museum curators and directors. His fundamental books and exhibition catalogues on the greatest figures of Spain’s “Golden Age,” including El Greco, Diego Velázquez, Francisco de Zurbarán, Jusepe de Ribera and Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, among others, earned him praise at home and abroad. Brown’s 1991 survey The Golden Age of Painting in Spain (expanded in 1998 and published as Painting in Spain 1500-1700) remains the standard volume on the subject.
Brown’s art historical methodology, with its emphasis on such contextual issues as patronage, the demands of the art market, changing currents of spiritual belief, along with intellectual, political and social milieu in which artists lived and worked, offered new, often bold interpretations. His openness to both interdisciplinary approaches and scholarly collaboration is abundantly evident in the book A Palace for a King: The Buen Retiro and the Court of Philip IV, written with renowned British historian John Elliott and published first in 1980 with an expanded version in 2003.
In Spain, Brown was both a revered and a sometimes-controversial figure. His analyses of art, highlighting socio-political, economic and religious readings, were often at odds with the more traditional form of descriptive art history that was the rule in Spain until recent decades. Established Spanish scholars often questioned the value and importance of Brown’s ideas and expansive understanding of Spanish culture, but they held enormous appeal for a younger generation of scholars eager to turn their backs on the isolation imposed by the Franco regime. Many of them, including the current director of the Prado Museum, Miguel Falomir, found their way to New York to attend Brown’s seminars at the IFA. Brown’s numerous collaborations with Spanish museums, joint projects with Spanish colleagues, and the prestige of his writings (many of his books quickly appeared in Spanish editions) made him into an “art historical legend” in the country he knew and loved so well.
Over the course of his career Brown received numerous honors including the Medalla de Oro de Bellas Artes (1986); Comendador de la Orden de Isabel la Católica (1986); the Grand Cross of Alfonso X (1996); The Sorolla Medal from the Hispanic Society of America (2008); and recognition by the College Art Association of America in 2011 as Distinguished Scholar. Brown was elected a Corresponding Member of the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando (Madrid), a Member of the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Carlos (Valencia) and, in 1988, membership in the American Philosophical Society. Between 1986 and 1996 he served on the Board of Directors of the Spanish Institute in New York City.
Among the themes closest to Brown was the phenomenon of collecting. His 1994 Andrew W. Mellon Lectures given at the National Gallery of Art (Washington D.C.) were published in 1995 as Kings and Connoisseurs: Collecting Art in Seventeenth Century Europe. This was also the subject of a 2002 exhibition at the Prado, organized in collaboration with Sir John Elliott. Brown’s passion for this subject led to the founding in 2007 (following Brown’s inspiration) of the Institute for the History of Collecting at The Frick Collection and the Frick Art Reference Library. Brown organized five exhibitions at the Frick, including the popular show “Goya’s Last Works” (with Susan Grace Galassi). His re-assessment of the final paintings and graphic work of this great eighteenth- and nineteenth-century artist mirrored the acuity that Brown had brought to his analysis of earlier Iberian master painters.
Beginning in 1994 Jonathan Brown’s attentions turned to the Spanish American world. An invitation to teach at the National Autonomous University in Mexico City provided the opportunity to examine firsthand masterpieces of what has been called “colonial art,” a mode of painting that Brown insisted on calling “Viceregal,” a term that has since gained considerable traction. His courses at the Institute of Fine Arts, his public lectures and his participation in a ground-breaking exhibition “Pintura de los reinos” (Painting in the Spanish Realms”), at the Prado and in Mexico City, attested to his new-found passion for Latin American art of the Early Modern era. In the spring of 2013, he curated the exhibition “Mexican Art at the Louvre: Masterpieces from the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries.” 2015 saw the publication of Brown’s co-authored (with Luisa Elena Alcalá and other contributors) volume entitled Painting in Latin America, 1550-1829. His final publication attested to his wide-ranging interests within his first love, the art of Spain. No solo Velázquez (2020) was compiled by Estrella de Diego and Robert Lubar Messeri and contained an author’s prologue and nineteen Spanish language versions of Brown’s essays concerning painting, sculpture and architecture from the late Middle Ages to Picasso. In his introduction Brown stated that “My principal stimulus was the desire to reintegrate Spanish art within its European context.”
Jonathan Brown is survived by his wife Sandra, his children Claire, Michael and Daniel and their spouses David, Jamie and Sarah and his four grandchildren, Benjamin, Leo, Jake and Max.
Spring 2022 Series We are delighted to announce the spring 2022 program of New York University’s Silsila: Center for Material Histories. The full details of our spring program are listed below and can also be found on our website:
Only registered attendees will be able to access the events. Links to register for each event can be found on the webpage for each, accessed through the website.
Silsila Spring 2022 SeriesFeb 2nd (Wed), 12:30-2:30pm “ILLUMINATING THE HISTORY OF PRIVATE DEVOTION IN THE MUSLIM WEST” Hiba Abid, Silsila/NYU
Feb 9th (Wed), 12:30-2:30pm “SILSILAS FROM THE ISLAMIC EAST: MIRACLES AND MATERIAL LIFE” Teren Sevea, Harvard University
Feb 23rd (Wed), 12:30-2:30pm “THE FABRIC OF THE CITY: SPACES OF SILK WEAVING AND MASS PRODUCTION IN EARLY MODERN KASHAN”Nader Sayadi, Metropolitan Museum of Art
Mar 2nd (Wed), 12:30-2:30pm “REVISITING THE GREAT MOSQUE OF DAMASCUS” Alain George, University of Oxford
Mar 9th (Wed), 12:30-2:30pm “THE THEATRE-CARAVANSERAI OF TBILISI. A HETEROTOPIA FROM THE CAUCASUS” Luka Nakhutsrishvili, Ilia State University, Tbilisi
Mar 30th (Wed), 12:30-2:30pm “MODERN MEN AND AMATEURS OF ANTIQUITIES: COLLECTING PRACTICE IN 19th OTTOMAN TUNISIA” Ridha Moumni, Harvard University
Apr 6th (Wed), 12:30-2:30pm “ARCHIVE WARS: THE POLITICS OF HISTORY IN SAUDI ARABIA” Rosie Bsheer, Harvard University
Apr 13th (Wed), 12:30-2:30pm “‘ABOU FARID’S WAR’ AND OTHER LOVE STORIES – ARTIST OMAR MISMAR IN CONVERSATION WITH JOAN RETALLACK” Omar Mismar, American University of Beirut & Joan Retallack, Bard College
Apr 20th (Wed), 12:30-2:30pm “THE QUR’AN IN PRACTICE” Anouk Cohen, CNRS Paris
Apr 27th (Wed), 12:30-2:30pm “BLOCK-PRINTED AMULETS FROM THE QUBBAT AL-KHAZNA IN DAMASCUS: DISCOVERY, TECHNIQUE AND TEXTS” Arianna D’Ottone Rambach, La Sapienza University, Rome
May 4th (Wed), 12:30-2:30pm “SLAVES AND MATERIAL CULTURE IN THE MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN MEDITERRANEAN” Lamia Balafrej, UCLA; M’hamed Oualdi, Sciences Po-Paris & Meredith Martin, NYU
January 28, 2022 Friday Celebrating Recent Work by David Freedberg Virtual Event @ 12:15pm EST
Iconoclasmby David Freedberg With new surges of activity from religious, political, and military extremists, the destruction of images has become increasingly relevant on a global scale. A founder of the study of early modern and contemporary iconoclasm, David Freedberg has addressed this topic for five decades. His work has brought this subject to a central place in art history, critical to the understanding not only of art but of all images in society. This volume collects the most significant of Freedberg’s texts on iconoclasm and censorship, bringing five key works back into print alongside new assessments of contemporary iconoclasm in places ranging from the Near and Middle East to the United States, as well as a fresh survey of the entire subject. The writings in this compact volume explore the dynamics and history of iconoclasm, from the furious battles over images in the Reformation to government repression in modern South Africa, the American culture wars of the early 1990s, and today’s cancel culture.
Freedberg combines fresh thinking with deep expertise to address the renewed significance of iconoclasm, its ideologies, and its impact. This volume also provides a supplement to Freedberg’s essay on idolatry and iconoclasm from his pathbreaking book, The Power of Images. Freedberg’s writings are of foundational importance to this discussion, and this volume will be a welcome resource for historians, museum professionals, international law specialists, preservationists, and students.Featuring David Freedberg, Zainab Bahrani, Finbarr Barry Flood, Barry Bergdoll, and Andrea Pinotti.
This event will take place virtually over Zoom. Registration is required.Please email disability@columbia.edu to request disability accommodations. Advance notice is necessary to arrange for some accessibility needs. This event will be recorded. By being electronically present, you consent to the SOF/Heyman using such video for promotional purposes.Register
RSVP Wednesday, February 16, 2021 Livestream at 6:30 PM ET
Tropical Aesthetics of Black Modernism examines the creative manifestations of black modernism, and explicates how tropicality functioned as a key unifying element in African Diasporic art. In this book, I argue that crucial artworks of the Caribbean modern art movement and of the Harlem Renaissance, as well as performance traditions ought not be viewed as being particular to their geopolitical parameters but rather as part of a larger African Diasporic mission. Given this reality, I contend that a discourse of internationalism existed in the realm of visual art and performance. By examining the art of Aaron Douglas and Wifredo Lam, as well as the performances of Josephine Baker, Maya Angelou and early twentieth-century Carnival masqueraders in Trinidad, I explicate how their representations of tropicalia are reflective of the unique yet complex relationship that black people of these respective regions have with the terrain they inhabit – land on which many of the enslaved ancestors labored. Despite this traumatic legacy, these creative works nonetheless show how this land is revered by their inhabitants who recognize them for their beauty, not with any intention to transform it but rather to accept it. Ultimately, this book seeks to illuminate the desire for early twentieth-century black Atlantic peoples to engender a sense of belonging to the citizenry, and a particular kind of claim to the land that they inhabit, which speaks to a desire for home.Samantha A. Noël is an Associate Professor of Art History and the Hawkins Ferry Endowed Chair in Modern and Contemporary Art at Wayne State University. She received her B.A. in Fine Art from Brooklyn College, C.U.N.Y., and her M.A. and Ph.D. in Art History from Duke University. Her research interests revolve around the history of art, visual culture and performance of the Black Diaspora. She has published on black modern and contemporary art and performance in journals such as Small Axe, Third Text, and Art Journal.
Fields of Vision 