Art

Forty-three language intervention studies published during the 1970s were critically analyzed in order to answer two major questions: (1) To what extent have these studies applied the theoretical models and empirical findings derived from current psycholinguistic research; and (2) To what extent have these intervention studies been successful in increasing the communicative competence of their severely impaired, primarily nonverbal subjects. A broad range of factors was analyzed, including (1) subjects and their characteristics; (2) prerequisite skills of the subjects prior to intervention; (3) the nature of the communication system taught; (4) the context, frequency, and duration of the intervention; (5) the nature of the structural and functional goals; (6) methods of intervention; and (7) gains in communication and other related areas. Findings indicated that except for the nature of the communication system taught and an awareness of the importance of evaluating gains, other tha...

Provenances of eastern white pine (Pinus strobus L.) were sampled from natural populations in Ontario and assessed in a 2-year greenhouse study followed by two 5-year short term field tests to reveal the scale and patterns of genetic variation in growth and adaptation at early ages. Results indicate that considerable genetic variation in growth potential exists among white pine populations in Ontario and that appreciable genetic gain can be realized through seed source selection in reforestation programs. Strong age-age correlation between growth traits at different years and the weak genotype-by-provenance interaction suggested high efficiency in provenance selection at early stage. Due to the latitude predominated clinal pattern of geographic variation and the significant reduction in growth potential when seeds are transferred from north to south, it is recommended not to use seed sources 1.5 to 2.0 degrees (latitude) north of a place where regeneration of eastern white pine occurs. Because of the relatively mild test environments at two sites and the short-term nature of this study, further research is required to investigate differences in cold hardiness among provenances before safe south to north seed transfer distances can be determined.

Over the course of Scarsellino’s long life, his artistic contributions included many works that proclaimed the artist’s affection for rendering mythological and secular subjects. This desire was met at the height of his career with the hegemonic restrictions placed on artists as a result of the Counter-Reformation of the Catholic Church. While many artists such as Venetian painter Paulo Veronese, took these attacks on artistic freedom as a challenge onto which they could confidently exercise their creative licenses, Scarsellino met the demands of the Church’s legislation on purely didactic imagery, while executing his compositions in a proto-Baroque style, which was also emblematic of the Humanist agenda of the Renaissance artists before him. One example of this pursuit and the focus of this essay, is his undated painting entitled Virgin and Angels Imploring Christ not to Punish Lust, Avarice, and Pride. In the painting, Christ is presented as dramatically emerging through the clouds of the heavenly realm in the act of casting punitive bolts of lightning upon figures that represent allegories of three of the seven deadly sins situated in the earthly realm below. The Virgin mother, kneeling at Christ's feet, along with the surrounding angels are all deeply imploring pity for the sinners who seem void of any concern or awareness for their fate. The scene, while seeming to directly advocate for obedience to the decree of the Church, seems to operate on the basis of a hidden agenda, which conveys Scarsellino’s artistic solutions to the transition of painting in Italy at the time. In this essay, I suggest that the artist’s use of conflicting imagery and allegorical elements in Virgin and Angels Imploring Christ not to Punish Lust, Avarice, and Pride alludes to the changing power of the church during the turn of the seventeenth century and suggests political commentary on the sensibility and opulence of the aristocracy leading into the Baroque period. Furthermore, the artist’s use of various formal devices and stylistic principles are clearly reflective of his ties to artists of the high Renaissance, and exhibit a unique arrangement of the duality in the compositional configuration and subject-matter of the two consecutive periods in western art history.

"American painter and printmaker Mary Cassatt spent much of her artistic career as an expatriate in France, where she befriended and exhibited among the Impressionists. While she is best known for her works portraying various social and private aspects of the lives of women, her portraits focusing on the intimate bonds between mothers and children have proven to be most deeply examined by scholars. During a time when the rapidly industrializing city of Paris contributed to many women being distanced from their role as wife, and most importantly as mother, Cassatt chose a subject that focused on these roles. In the last two decades of the 19th century, the gap between mother and children widened for all classes, where the working class women had to spend time away from the home in jobs, and employment of governesses became a common trend in upper class homes. It is this loss of maternal connection that Cassatt seems to be refuting in her portraits of mothers and children. Through the use of various formal devices, Cassatt formulates her own artistic commentary on the relationship between the mother and child in late 19th century France. The repeated nudity of her children alludes to the purity of the subject and the foundations of the unadulterated fashion-less natural world of the child. If the children in her work are not completely nude, they are almost always enrobed in white or off white attire or linen, still suggesting the essence of purity and innocence. With little to no distinction of class, Cassatt’s children serve as the universal truth of the child, and therefore speak to the human condition. However, there is a bold contradiction in these works that raises issues of class, gender, and beauty. While the children in her portraits embody the unequivocal symbol of nature, innocence, and purity, Cassatt renders her mothers in a style that directly identifies them as modern 19th century upper class Parisian women. Her attention to detail in representing the avant-garde fashion of the modern bourgeois woman begs
consideration when attempting to understand the depth of the relationships she portrays and their thematic contradictions."

It is a scene so famous that it seems highly unlikely that most people raised in Western society would not be able to identify its key players. The caregiver: as modest and delicate as she is sovereign, a sincerely divine presence that could only be fit for the mother of God. The child: no different in physicality to that of any other infant, yet enveloped in an aura of sublime radiance that challenges all notions of the ordinary. The iconic scene of the virgin and child has been a popular subject of commission for artists in the centuries following its rise to popularity after the confirmation of the Virgin Mary as the mother of Christ in 431.  Such a traditionally valued symbol of the core of Christianity later proved as a perfect venue for the development of new ideas and techniques of the artists of the Renaissance in Italy. For Leonardo da Vinci, the virgin and child theme became the subject of some of his most experimental and controversial projects, including his drawing series that is arguably the most mysterious of its kind, The Madonna with the Cat. Although equipped with the standard elements found in other renditions of the virgin and child scene, the Madonna with the Cat is significantly different in the figural dialogue and nature of application than any works preceding it; but this alone is not what makes this series so exceptional for its time. The true phenomenon here is Leonardo’s employment of the cat in the scene.
While the unorthodox presence of felines in Leonardo’s work has baffled scholars for years, it has for the most part been only lightly investigated or left inconclusive. Although it has been recorded that Leonardo was a lover of all animals , his connection with cats seems to have been one so passionately driven that they became a preoccupation of his that seems to have influenced work spanning his entire career.

What would compel a young woman, wife and mother in the 1950’s to drop the post-war American dream and jump into the wrestling ring? In 1951, Rosalyn Drexler did just that. Sacrificing the conventional lifestyle of the domesticated housewife, mother and consumer, she became “Rosa Carlo, The Mexican Spitfire,” a fearless epitome of a masked super woman and the antithesis of the post-war feminine American ideal. Whether or not her intentions could be interpreted as an early rebellion of the societal constraints placed on women at the time, her short lived hiatus from convention had a tremendous impact on her life and set a proto-feminist pace for her creative career. Although her career as a woman wrestler was brief, its presence in her paintings of the 1960’s manifests itself in the form of satirical narratives exploring the subversive themes of power, dominance, gender, and deception in a style that has been strongly associated with the Pop Art movement. The ubiquitous presence of malevolence, angst, turmoil and struggle in Drexler’s work is particularly strong in the series she calls, “Love and Violence”, made during the early 1960’s. As provocative as the subjects of these paintings are in their obscure romance, they seem to invoke her early career in wrestling through various visual devices. By employing the concept of the “spectacle”, which in wrestling is about the exterior illusion of passion and moral mechanism played out by characters and theatrical masking of actual humanity,  Drexler takes the pop culture “illusion” of perfection and “masked” figures of celebrity out of scenes of pulp fiction novels, B- movie posters, tabloid imagery and film noir stills and deglamorizes them with paint.  Through the examination of the discursive relationships that she develops between the concept of “spectacle” and the figures she appropriates and recreates, associations with the female wrestling world not only emerge but also provide insight into an artistic agenda that has perhaps been previously over looked in interpretations of her work.

Admiration, shock, curiosity, repulsion, and empathy: these and many more compose the index of emotions commonly felt in the reception of Jusepe de Ribera’s 1631 painting, La Mujer Barbuda ( “The Bearded Woman”). Without having knowledge of the title, the viewer may initially identify the work as a scene of two maturely aged men. However, supplementary inspection would reveal the curiosities at work here once the object being held by the central figure is recognized as an infant, and the unnaturally Cyclops-like bulbous breast of the distinctly masculine figure comes into focus. Following these observations, rationalization becomes effortful through the indirect and inconsequential nature of the remaining elements of the scene. An image comprised of such blatantly perverse contradictions might not seem out of the ordinary if produced in the art world today. However, as a portrait painting done during the high point of the Italian and Spanish Baroque, it comes as no surprise that its deeply startling subject matter has attracted the attention of numerous scholarly opinions in terms of its role in the understanding of gender identity and sexuality during the early seventeenth century. Perhaps, even more fascinating than the odd subject of Ribera’s painting is the fact that the Baroque work still possesses the ability to conjure attention from viewers in a twenty-first century world that has more or less become desensitized to almost any image of unorthodox nature. Is this because the composition itself breaches the conventional contract of art of its time, or is it possible that the effect that Ribera set out to install in the minds of his audience has proven powerful enough to withstand the hands of time and constantly evolving expanse of the human condition? In portraying what is supposed to be an honest portrait from real-life, I suggest that Ribera’s La Mujer Barbuda strays from the conventional notions of the “bearded woman”, and introduces a visual commentary on the acceptance of a third gender in Baroque Italy. While depicting his unorthodox subject in a manner that reflects and refines the influence of earlier Baroque artists, Ribera negates the art of the Renaissance, and formulates entirely modern ideas that demonstrate the profound changes in post-Reformation paintings, and freedom from the moral and social
restrictions in Spain.

Philadelphia is an example of a historic American city that is characterized by many of the problems associated with urban sprawl, rapid transitional growth and gentrification since its founding in 1682. Efforts by urban planners during the 20th century to ensure that the city was on the track to a sustainable future, yielded varietal results, some of which were less than desirable when aiming to create new public urban spaces. Looking at the public spaces found within a city can indicate a great deal about its overall condition. The success of public spaces often depends on key elements to create an urban area that is as inviting as it is useful to its residents. Many of Philadelphia’s unsuccessful public spaces share a set of universal factors that contribute to their failure and lack the tools necessary in encouraging circulation, socialization, economic activity and an overall better quality of life for its residents. By analyzing the planning and development of four major types of urban public space in Philadelphia, and focusing on specific sites, it becomes evident that connections to the surrounding environment express the importance of maintaining the relationship between the urban public space and the historic integrity of the city within a contemporary context.

This article analyzes one of the most famous — and notorious — examples of iconoclasm in the classical world, the Persian sack of the Athenian Acropolis in 480 B.C.  It demonstrates that while the destruction of an enemy’s sanctuaries was commonplace in ancient warfare, the Acropolis sack took on paradigmatic significance as an example of ‘Oriental violence’ due to the manner in which it was commemorated.  To explore the evolution of this paradigm, I chart a series of Athenian responses to the Acropolis sack, beginning with the re-use of architectural fragments in the citadel walls and culminating in the sculptural program of the Periklean Parthenon.  I examine major Athenian monuments within a broader historical perspective and draw upon literary, archaeological, and artistic evidence to address questions of collective memory as well as the origins of Orientalism.

This article re-examines the well-known Hellenistic statue of Aphrodite from Melos (the ‘Venus de Milo’), drawing on recently published archaeological evidence and archival sources relating to its excavation to propose a new reconstruction of the sculpture’s original appearance, context, and audience.  While scholars have often discussed the statue as a timeless ideal of female beauty, the Aphrodite was in fact carefully adapted to its contemporary setting, the minor Hellenistic polis of Melos. With its conservative yet creative visual effect, the sculpture offers a well-preserved early example of the Hellenistic emulation of Classical art, and opens a window onto the rarely examined world of a traditional Greek city during a period of dynamic change.

The statue, it is argued, was set up within the civic gymnasium of Melos.  Furthermore, Aphrodite likely held out an apple in token of her victory in the Judgment of Paris, as newly accessible sculptural fragments found with the statue demonstrate. The sculpture responds to and transforms both Classical visual prototypes and earlier narratives of the Judgment, familiar to Greek audiences from the period of Homer onwards.  And the Aphrodite was appropriate for display within a gymnasium since it exemplifies a critical aspect of that institution’s role during the Hellenistic period:  the creation of a standardized and highly selective vision of the past to serve as a model for the present.  Thus the statue, analyzed within its original context, greatly enhances our understanding of the reception of Classical sculpture and mythological narrative in Hellenistic Greece.

In the Augustan era, Greek-style images of Aphrodite permeated Roman visual culture.  From the elaborate state-sponsored monuments of the new regime, to more modest private homes, the goddess of love featured prominently in works of art whose idealized naturalism was inspired by the achievements of Classical and Hellenistic Greece.  These images, widely popular in Augustan times, marked a distinct break with earlier practice.  They replaced the sober and imposing Venus of the Republic — divine ancestress of Rome, and victory-bringing goddess of Sulla, Pompey, and Caesar — with a more elegant, Hellenized deity.  In so doing, they offered a particularly vivid example of a broader cultural phenomenon:  Augustan classicism.

In recent years, scholars have highlighted the moral and ethical connotations of classicism in the early empire.  Drawing especially on elite literary texts, they have characterized classicism as an elevated style appropriate for the gods, and for the new princeps.  This article brings together Greek-style images of Aphrodite from the public and private realms to offer a different perspective; my focus is on the allure, rather than the moral authority, of Classical forms.  At the same time, I demonstrate how this allure took on programmatic functions in the early principate.  In major public monuments such as the Forum Augustum, it signaled the attractive qualities of the new imperial system through the metaphor of a beautiful woman’s body.  In paintings and statuettes from the private sphere, by contrast, it helped to create the pleasurable ambiance that was central to the Roman conception of otium.  This article thus complements earlier studies to provide a more nuanced understanding of Greek art, and especially Greek Aphrodite types, in Roman visual culture.

This article concerns iconoclasm in the German provinces of the Roman Empire. Scholars have generally blamed ‘barbarians’ from outside the empire for violence towards images in this border region.  Drawing on visual, epigraphic, and archaeological evidence, I argue instead that Late Antique Christians were responsible for the most extensive and destructive attacks.  This has important implications for our understanding of the reception of religious images in Roman provincial society.  In addition, it offers an illuminating case study of the workings of iconoclasm in a well-documented but neglected period.

This article re-examines a series of Antonine mythological group portraits, which have been frequently identified as imperial commissions.  Drawing on new archaeological evidence as well as sources for their findspots and restoration histories, I argue that they were in fact private portraits, suitable for the commemoration of married couples in house and tomb.  The sculptures juxtaposed idealized divine bodies based on Greek statue types of Ares and Aphrodite with descriptive portrait heads of Antonine elite couples.  In so doing, they offered patrons an unusual, yet compelling, means by which to represent the affective qualities of Roman marriage through reference to Greek myth and art.  This article’s analysis of the monumental groups in Mars-Venus format complements recent scholarship on single-figure mythological portraits to offer a fuller picture of the transformation of Classical Greek imagery in Roman private art