The Art Bulletin
September 2010, Volume XCII Number 3

Articles
Aegyptus Redacta: The Egyptian Obelisk in the Augustan Campus Martius
MOLLY SWETNAM-BURLAND
135

The obelisk that stands today in the Piazza Montecitorio in Rome, placed
there by Pope Pius VI in 1792, had two previous "lives." Quarried in
Aswan, Egypt, it was brought down the Nile and erected in Heliopolis by
Psametik
II (r. 594­589 BCE). Nearly six hundred years later, it was shipped to
Rome
and set in the Campus Martius in 10 BCE by Augustus. Each act of
appropriation
added another layer of meaning to the monument, and it is through
awareness of these "first lives" that we arrive at a fuller understanding
of its later reuse and display.

Circles of Creation: The Invention of Maya Cartography in Early Colonial
Yucatán
AMARA L. SOLARI
154

With the colonization of the American continents in the early sixteenth
century, cartography emerged as a visual medium through which diverse
colonial actors asserted corporate identities. Given the novelty of this
pictorial genre, the Maya of the Yucatán Peninsula effectively invented a
cartographic tradition, using a seemingly benign compositional form, the
circle. This was no arbitrary choice; native artist-scribes derived this
composition from literary tropes found in pre-Columbian cosmogonic
narratives. As such, colonial Maya maps inhabited the conflictual domain
of colonial interaction, overtly satisfying Spanish dictates while
allowing
Maya communities to maintain their identity amid the violence of
colonization.

Material Futures: Reproducing Revolution in P.-L. Debucourt¹s Almanach
National
RICHARD TAWS
169

Philibert-Louis Debucourt¹s 1790 Almanach national, intended to serve as
a frame for a pasted calendar for the subsequent year, is a unique
combination of allegory and everyday scene. Dominated by a bas-relief
representing the National Assembly, the image presents responses to the
French Revolution organized in terms of race, age, and social class and
features a singular representation of a female newspaper vendor at work.
Debucourt¹s image effectively mobilizes print to conceptualize the
reproduction of Revolution across temporal and national boundaries,
providing a means of thinking about the relation between Revolutionary
time and the materiality of the image.

Giandomenico Tiepolo's Il Mondo Nuovo: Peep Shows and the "Politics of
Nostalgia"
DARIUS A. SPIETH
188

What was the historiography of Il mondo nuovo, a fresco painted in 1791 by
Giandomenico Tiepolo? How did its title emerge? Giandomenico likely found
the inspiration for his subject in popular entertainment on Venice's
Piazzetta. The houselike structure in the fresco¹s middle ground‹a peep
show‹had been labeled il mondo nuovo by the eighteenth-century playwright
Carlo Goldoni. Yet the fresco was not named until after 1906. Art
historian Pompeo Molmenti introduced the Goldoni-inspired title, his
efforts seconded by Corrado Ricci, a powerful art administrator. Both
were steeped in the "politics of nostalgia," associated with the Italian
Aesthetic movement.

Rioting Refigured: George Henry Hall and the Picturing of American
Political Violence
ROSS BARRETT
211

In 1858, American artist George Henry Hall completed A Dead Rabbit (Study
of the Nude or Study of an Irishman), a stunning picture of a
working-class Irish rioter. Directly engaging a subject‹political
violence‹that contradicted the orderly imperatives of antebellum aesthetic
and democratic theory, Hall undertook a project fraught with risk and
difficulty. Reframing the midcentury rioter as an ideal nude, A Dead
Rabbit seems both to temper and exacerbate the alarming connotations of
violent upheaval. Marked by contradiction, the painting offers a unique
lens on the broader conflicts and quiet ambivalences that complicated
bourgeois responses to antebellum violence.

Ed Ruscha, Pop Art, and Spectatorship in 1960s Los Angeles
KEN D. ALLAN
231

Ed Ruscha's paintings and books of photographs are often interpreted as
images of Los Angeles seen through the car windshield or read as
billboards and movie screens. An examination of the material and spatial
complexities of his work revealed by the viewer's encounter with it as an
object illuminates the connection between Ruscha¹s practice and modes of
spectatorship crucial to the art of the 1960s. Ruscha responded to the
spatial experience of Los Angeles by experimenting with size and scale in
his work in a way that also gives the viewer a new approach to the city
itself.

Reviews
Melissa McCormick, Tosa Mitsunobu and the Small Scroll in Medieval Japan
TIMON SCREECH
250

Stuart Lingo, Federico Barocci: Allure and Devotion in Late Renaissance
Painting
CHARLES DEMPSEY
251

Erika Naginski, Sculpture and Enlightenment
SATISH PADIYAR
256

Kaja Silverman, Flesh of My Flesh
KAREN BECKMAN
258

Reviews Online
263