Art Bulletin
June 2006, v 88 / 2 | Contents

Articles

Framing the Sun: The Arch of Constantine and the Roman Cityscape
Elizabeth Marlowe
223

Approaching the Arch of Constantine in fourth-century Rome, the northbound
traveler beheld a spectacular tableau of monuments. The position of the
arch negotiated the divergent orientations of the triumphal road and the
monuments in the Colosseum Valley. It also framed the colossal Neronian
statue of Sol through the arch's central passageway, in a highly
scenographic display of the comity between the emperor and the sun god.
This appropriation of the ancient colossus sheds light on the arch's
overall program, on other acts of appropriation in Constantinian Rome, and
on the emperor's religious tendencies.

A Renaissance Audience Considered: The Nuns at S. Apollonia and Castagno's
Last Supper
Andrée Hayum
243

Andrea del Castagno's Last Supper has been well known to art historians
especially once it began to appear in general survey books more than forty
years ago. Its treatment, however, was often either from the retrospective
vantage point of Leonardo's more famous example in Milan or in terms of
the development of this theme within the context of monastery refectories
in Florence. Since Castagno's Last Supper was commissioned for a convent
of Benedictine nuns, research about gender and aspects of women's piety is
brought to bear in an exploration of how Castagno's remarkable fresco
related to its original female viewers.

The Discourse of Failure in Seventeenth-Century Rome: Prospero Bresciano's
Moses
Steven F. Ostrow
267

Since the moment of its unveiling in 1588, Prospero Bresciano's Moses,
which adorns the center of the Fontana dell'Acqua Felice in Rome, was
ridiculed as a "monster" and the work of a "sculptor who had lost his
mind." One of its earliest critics, Giovanni Baglione, similarly
denigrated the statue, framing his critique in terms of art theory and
fabricating a moral tale around the work's failure. What emerges from an
examination of the early responses to the Moses is both a tragicomic fable
in the history of art and a lesson in reading and interpreting early
modern art criticism.

The "Ghosting" of Incest and Female Relations in Harriet Hosmer's Beatrice
Cenci
Vivien Green Fryd
292

Viewed within the context of mid-nineteenth-century attitudes toward
gender and sexuality, Harriet Hosmer's sculpture Beatrice Cenci reveals
that the artist recognized ways in which texts about Beatrice Cenci
"ghosted" her status as a victim of incestual rape. The sculpture's
subject, patricide in retaliation for incest, intersects with the artist's
unconventional lifestyle and sexuality. These themes derive from society's
containment and condemnation of sexuality, Hosmer's interest in
unconventional behavior and ambivalences about normative sexuality,
Cenci's radical striking back against patriarchal oppression, and the
nineteenth-century women's movement.

The Uncharted Kahn: The Visuality of Planning and Promotion in the 1930s
and 1940s
Andrew M. Shanken
310

The examination of a Louis Kahn diagram illuminates the visual sources and
strategies that architects used in the 1940s to communicate the obscure
language of urban planning to the public. The larger set of issues
concerns the visual culture of modern bureaucracy and the ways in which
consumer culture, urban planning, and public relations dovetailed in an
age of experts, and did so by harnessing modernist art and graphic
techniques. Kahn's diagram opens up the possible links between the Vienna
Circle philosopher Otto Neurath, New Deal literature, abstraction in art,
and the social mission of the Modern Movement in architecture.

Judaic Threads in the West African Tapestry: No More Forever?
Labelle Prussin
328

The perception of the Sahara Desert as an impenetrable barrier overlooks
the reality that for millennia, trade, travel, and communication generated
a rich repertoire of similarities in iconography, style, and technology
between North and West Africa. These can be partly credited to itinerant
and resident Jews under the aegis of Islam, European expansion, nomadism,
and indigenous rule. Combining scholarship and artisanship with the trades
over which they exercised a virtual world monopoly (precious metals, gold
and silk embroidery, silk and indigo cloth) they contributed to a
pan-Saharan design network by integrating Judaic traditions and Islamic
proscriptions into indigenous African cultures.

Andy Warhol's Silver Elvises: Meaning through Context at the Ferus Gallery
in 1963
David Mccarthy
354

Both time and place played pivotal roles in the conception, installation,
and intended meaning of the series of silver Elvises that Andy Warhol
produced in the summer of 1963 for exhibition at the Ferus Gallery in Los
Angeles. The appropriation of a banal publicity photograph indicates that
Warhol's primary parodic target was the Hollywood Western, while the
coupling of the series with portraits of Elizabeth Taylor echoed a similar
gender binary found in the canonical work of Marcel Duchamp. As such, the
silver Elvises constitute an important moment in Warhol's attempt to wed
mass culture and vanguard art.

Book Reviews

Book Review Editor's Note
373

Interventions Reviews: Hal Foster, Rosalind Krauss, Yve-Alain Bois, and
Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Art since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism,
Postmodernism
Nancy J. Troy, Geoffrey Batchen, Amelia Jones, Pamela M. Lee, Romy Golan,
Robert Storr, Jodi Hauptman, Dario Gamboni
373

Sarah E. Fraser, Performing the Visual: The Practice of Buddhist Wall
Painting in China and Central Asia, 618-960
Angela F. Howard
389

Paul Binski, Becket's Crown: Art and Imagination in Gothic England
1170-1300
Paul Crossley
393

Richard Marks, Image and Devotion in Late Medieval England
Kathryn A. Smith
396

John House, Impressionism: Paint and Politics; Joachim Pissarro,
Pioneering Modern Painting: Cézanne and Pissarro, 1865-1885
James H. Rubin
399

U.S. and Canadian Dissertations
403

Books Received
432

Reviews Online
438