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- ItemThe Witch as a Mirror: Dürer and Grien’s Demonization of the Female Body(2024) Johnson-Fraidin, Maya; Streiter, NavaIn the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, Albrecht Dürer and his student Hans Baldung Grien developed two different ways of portraying the increasingly popular archetypes of the witch due to rising fear of the anti-Christian, Satan worshipping, woman in early modern Europe. Although Dürer and Grien worked alongside each other and amongst a similar milieu of artists and thinkers, their prints and drawings were informed by different sources and intended for different audiences. Dürer, working in the highly reproducible medium of print, incorporated iconography from fifteenth century demonologist treatises on witchcraft in his engravings of witches to educate the viewer. He also integrated the early modern period’s humanist curiosity about the witch and female sexuality more generally by highlighting the differences between the lustful, evil witch and the classical goddess of sensual love. Dürer’s widely dispersed, highly symbolic prints of nude female figures situated his artwork within humanist discourse, whereas Grien created drawings of entangled, nude, female witches in erotic art intended for a small audience. This paper investigates the development of Dürer and Grien’s distinct iconographies of witches, situating their individual perspectives on the female body and sexuality within the context of the Protestant Reformation and humanist movement in early modern Germany. Through my investigation of the contemporaneous and classical sources that influenced Dürer and Grien’s compositions, I find that Dürer established the foundation of densely iconographic witch images that situated the mythical figure within an early modern European cultural context. By contrast, Grien stripped down Dürer’s layers of symbolism to signify the witch with the nude female form.
- ItemAfrosurreal: Behold the Invisible Worlds of Ringgold and Kentridge(2024) Hannah, Cole; Saltzman, LisaAfrosurrealism is not just a movement or a genre. Afrosurrealism is the manifestation of African and African American scholars, writers, and artists who have devoted countless years and resources towards capturing the lived, contemporary Black experience on paper and canvas. Ralph Ellison, Jean Paul Sartre, Amiri Baraka, and now D. Scot Miller have all built their own interpretations of Afrosurrealism through the words of previous accounts. However, as definitions and guidelines for Baraka’s abstraction evolved after the release of each new published paper, the growing exclusivity of Afrosurrealism became antithetical to its function as an artistic genre. Hence, my use of Afrosurrealism as a framework. In performing an Afrosurrealist reading of Faith Ringgold’s Jo Baker’s Bananas and William Kentridge’s Monument, I was able to unearth and answer questions revolving around race, gender, and identity within both pieces. The Invisible World of Afrosurrealism not only conceals our bodies, our fears, and our secrets, it also functions as the key from which Black expression can passionately and unapologetically flourish.
- Item"When All the Graves Were Full": Anthropological Confrontations at The Triumph of Death of Pisa(2020) Kline, Rachel; Culbertson, Jacob; Giammei, Alessandro, 1988-This thesis will aim to consider the social processes and sociocultural environment central to viewing imagery of dead and dying bodies in Late Medieval Italy. Specifically, I will investigate The Triumph of Death (Il Trionfo della Morte) fresco by Buonamico Buffalmacco (ca. 1330's) at the Camposanto in Pisa and the broader religious complex to consider how the artwork and architecture were utilized to mediate the experience of fourteenth century Pisans. I will argue that the fresco contains apotropaic qualities which seek to fend off the threat of death from plague, yet also force the viewer into a memento mori rooted in Dominican theology. The scholarship and methodology of anthropologist Alfred Gell will be central to my discussion surrounding the sociocultural implications of art production and I will focus on the power of art as a social agent working as an intermediary in the social world of the fourteenth century. In addition, the anthropological theory of new materialism, specifically the scholarship of Amiria Henare, will aid in demystifying Late Medieval spectatorship not simply as a different way of seeing things but as the construction and inhabitation of a separate world. These theoretical lenses will both build upon and challenge Michael Baxandall's theory of the period eye which states that there is a linkage between the lived world of the viewer and the representational imagery of contemporaneous art. In situating The Triumph of Death anthropologically, I will aim to resurrect the social world of the viewer central to the Trecento experience of this work of art.
- ItemImagining Africa: Négritude and Primitivism in Corps perdu(2020) Kerper, Alyssa; Anyinefa, Koffi, 1959-; McKee, C. C.My thesis explores the way Pablo Picasso and Aimé Césaire claim Africa as a source of inspiration in their jointly-published book Corps perdu , an illustrated volume of poetry released in Paris in 1950. I look at the way Négritude, Césaire's guiding philosophy, and primitivism, an art movement popularized by Picasso, rely on a vision of Africa as both the romanticized home of "primitive," pre-colonized culture and as the site of horrific violence and exploitation. Using both text and image as evidence, I argue that the book mobilizes this conception of Africa in order to amplify the black voice in twentieth-century European culture
- ItemLittle Woolen Things: Provenance and Typological Analysis of Surviving Nälbound Footwear from Late Antique Egypt(2020) Stern, Alexandra; Bradbury, JennieStudies of surviving materials from late antique Egypt have identified nälbound footwear as a unique category of textile remains. Previous work on the topic, however, has focused predominantly on technique and construction, and less on an analysis of the surviving body of materials as a whole. This paper serves to collate known information about the original archaeological context of these materials, wherever possible, and proposes a typological framework by length upon which future research might be constructed. In the creation of this framework, individual properties, including polychromatic stripes, single-toe construction, and low wear patterns are seen to be correlated with small socks likely meant for children.