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  Viceroyalty of Brazil

  Amy Buono

  The Viceroyalty of Brazil (c. 1720–1815) refers to a polity that, at its greatest extent, roughly corresponded in geographic area to the modern nation-state of Brazil. Lying on the upper Atlantic coast of South America, it is bounded on the northeast by the Guyanas, to the northwest by the Viceroyalty of New Granada, to the west by the Viceroyalty of Peru, and to the southwest and south by the Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata. Northern Brazil is dominated by the densely forested basin of the Amazon River and its many tributaries, which include the Tapajó and Xingu rivers, which empty into the Atlantic at Marajó Island. The Atlantic forests stretched over 330 million acres of the eastern seaboard at the time of colonization, representing both the region of greatest cultural activity and the initial economic motivation for European engagements with Brazil: the brazilwood trade. The Cerrado, a region of tropical savannas, occupy much of the central and southern interior of Brazil. The arid backlands of Brazil’s northeastern regions form the Sertão. Salvador was the first capital of Portuguese America, and in 1700, with the exception of Philadelphia, was larger than any city in English colonial America. When the capital was moved to Rio de Janeiro in 1763, Brazil was elevated to the status of a Viceroyalty, though the colony, per the Portuguese Crown, officially retained the name, “The States of Brazil.” In 1800, the Viceroyalty of Brazil had a population of 2,424,641, with slaves accounting for 31 percent of all inhabitants (de Matos 2016, 276).

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  Like Night and Day: Pavel Florenskiĭ, Igor’ Grabar’, and the Fate of Icons in the 1920s

  Wendy Salmond

  "The preservation of medieval icons in the early years of Soviet power is deservedly considered one of the cultural triumphs of that iconoclastic period, when the very future of icons hung precariously in the balance. The nationalization of church property, the dissolution or destruction of so many monasteries and churches, and the pervasive mood of iconoclasm that followed the Bolshevik Revolution placed Russia’s most important icons in a precarious position. Their survival depended on the efforts of a small group of scholars and restorers operating under the aegis of NARKOMPROS’s museum and conservation wing (Glazmuseĭ in its various iterations; later consolidated in the Central State Restoration Workshops).1 But the physical preservation of icons was not the only challenge. At issue was whether they could acquire an acceptable meaning that would ensure them sanctuary in this hostile new world. For this reason, the language used to talk about icons was particularly important in creating a powerful rhetorical field of protection and validation. My essay considers the metaphorical refashioning of icons, from the unstable transitional years of 1918-1920, when multiple possibilities for the treatment of cultural heritage still beckoned, to 1928-1931, when those possibilities had dwindled to a single, ideologically dictated option. In this contentious process, Father Pavel Florenskiĭ and the artist and art historian Igor’ Grabar’ came to occupy positions on either side of a growing cultural abyss."

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  The "Russian Street" at the 1901 Glasgow International Exhibition

  Wendy Salmond

  "Fedor Shekhtel's four pavilions for the 1901 Glasgow International Exhibition are often described as the birthplace of stil' modern, a specifically Russian response to the international phenomenon of Art Nouveau. But with their volatile mix of vernacular and modern forms they can also be seen as a reflection of the 'Witte System,' the process of rapid industrialization to which Serge Witte committed Russia during his tenure as Minister of Finance (1892-1903). Witte took up his post just in time to approve Ivan Ropet's designs for the Russian section at the 1892 Columbia World's Exposition in Chicago; he stepped down two years after signing off on Shekhtel's plans for Glasgow. The years in between these two exhibitions saw both the radical transformation of Russian society and a corresponding shift in how Russia presented itself at the world's fairs. The Old Russian Style that had satisfied the outside world's expectations of Russian culture for decades gave way, if only briefly, to a dynamic and unsettling neo-Russian style. When a British reviewer dismissed the Glasgow pavilions as 'the new are seen through Slavic distorting glasses,' he was responding not only to Shekhtel's architectural experiment, but also to the self-presentation of a state under intense pressure to 'move a traditional society onto new historical tracks.'"

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  Ellis H. Minns and Nikodim Kondakov’s The Russian Icon (1927)

  Wendy Salmond

  "Kondakov’s magnum opus [The Russian Icon] failed to win an audience. Though it appeared just in time for a surge of popular interest in Russian icons abroad, it never became the book of choice for the English-speaking public seeking a guide through the ‘dark forest’ of the icon’s history... My chapter offers some suggestions for why this crude caricature of Kondakov’s work took hold in the 1920s and became axiomatic throughout the Soviet period. In particular, it considers the role that Minns’s translation may have played, however inadvertently, in cementing this impression. Minns’s interventions in and framing of the text highlight the turmoil and uncertainty of the 1920s, when the emerging history of the Russian icon was a touchstone for generational as well as ideological conflicts."

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  Francisco Pedro do Amaral (c. 1780-1830)

  Amy J. Buono

  A biographical essay on Francisco Pedro do Amaral (c. 1780–1830), Afro- Brazilian painter, stage designer, and decorative artist.

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  Introduction. Stars, Water Wings, and Hairs. Bernini’s Career in Metaphor

  Claudia Lehmann and Karen J. Lloyd

  Examining Bernini's works from 1665 on, from Paris and Rome, this book demonstrates the wealth of material still to be drawn from close visual and material examination, archival research, and comparative textual analysis. On the whole, this collection deals with Bernini's position as the leading creator of portraits - in oils, marble, monumental architecture, and metaphor - of some of the most powerful political players of his day. These studies speak to the growing distance of Gallic absolutism from the fading dreams of papal hegemony over Europe, and to the complexities of Bernini's role as mouthpiece, obstacle, and flatterer of the Princes of the Papal States.

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  Capomastro and Courier: Giacomo Borzacchi and Bernini's Equestrian Statue of Louis XIV in Transit

  Karen J. Lloyd

  "On February 24, 1684, Giacomo Borzacchi was given small iron pegs and wooden wedges by the members of the Fabbrica (Building Works) of St. Peter's, "which he needs for the armature that he is making for the horse and statue of the King of France."1 Borzacchi was a kind of handyman-a mason and engineer-who was in the regular employ of the Fabbrica for almost 30 years. His project in 1684, the "armature," must have been the wooden support structure needed to safeguard Gian Lorenzo Bernini's equestrian statue of French King Louis XIV on its long trip to Paris. The previously unpublished Fabbrica payment is the earliest dated indication of action being taken to start Bernini's horse on its journey from the artist's former studio at the Vatican, near the Santa Marta gate. Acting as a belated ambassador for Bernini, it was Borzacchi who accompanied the statue when it finally made its way to France in 1685."

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  Pavel Tretiakov’s Icons

  Wendy Salmond

  "Between 1890 and his death in 1898, the Moscow art collector Pavel Tretiakov acquired sixty-two icons of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. With this comparatively late entry into the world of icons, Tretiakov laid the foundation for one of the world’s greatest collections of medieval Russian paintings. Why is it, then, that Tretiakov’s icons are today so rarely mentioned and so hard to find? The most practical explanation is that they were simply swallowed up into the vast repositories of the reorganized State Tretiakov Gallery in 1930, along with thousands of icons from churches and private collections nationalized afer 1917. As a result, locating them in the gallery’s catalogue is a painstaking task and finding images of them a challenge. A more complicated reason is that the icons that Tretiakov chose—the very best money could buy in the 1890s— quickly became old-fashioned and aesthetically devalued in the next century. Beginning around 1905, as sixteenth-century icons were discovered and cleaned, icon painting’s Golden Age was moved several centuries back in time, from the court culture of the Muscovite state and the first Romanov tsars to Republican Novgorod. Tretiakov’s icons were caught up in this process of reevaluation, victims of a revolution in aesthetic criteria fought along generational lines."

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  Purposeful Ephemera: The Implications of Self-Destructing Technology for the Future Practice of Archaeology

  Justin St. P. Walsh

  This chapter is presented from the perspective of a professional archaeologist who specializes in Greek archaeology, intercultural contact and exchange, and the ethics of cultural heritage. His chapter investigates the mandates for discard and “design for demise” of space objects in the wider context of cultural phenomena from all cultures. The chapter finds comparanda for purposeful ephemera in examples from the media of performance, architecture, and visual art.

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  An Imperial Collection: Exploring the Hammers' Icons

  Wendy Salmond

  "Changing hands one last time, in the 1950s, for many years the icons at BJU lived as it were incognito, the details of their glamorous origins largely forgotten. Reuniting this core group-the cream of the Hammers' imperial icons--with others that passed into American museums in the 1930s allows us to appreciate the full significance of Armand and Victor Hammer's foray into marketing icons Americans.Viewed in isolation, most of their "imperial icons" are perhaps no mo than a poignant reminder of the vast destruction and dislocation of Orthodox culture during the Soviet Cultural Revolution. Taken together, however, they paint a vivid picture of an historical moment in which Russian icons underwent the tortuous transformation from devotional object to collectible work of art."

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  Crafts of Color: Tupi Tapirage in Early Colonial Brazil

  Amy Buono

  "Tyrian purple. Lamp black. Lead white. Cadmium yellow. Ultramarine blue. The materiality of color, as it is often discussed, has a fixed quality. Pigments and dyes derived from many natural substances-minerals, earths, plants, and animals-have stable optic qualities. Lapis lazuli can be reliably counted upon to be blue. Dyes made from cochineal consistently fall within a certain range at the red end of the spectrum. Similarly, we might expect that the green feathers of a bird such as the Festive Parrot (Amazona festiva), after molting, would be replaced by equally green plumes. As the excerpt above suggests, from a letter written in Brazil by the Portuguese humanist Gandavo, this need not always be the case. In this chapter, I will discuss the cultural and conceptual ramifications of the feather alteration practices of the Tupi 'nations' of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century coastal Brazil, one of the most sophisticated featherworking cultures of the Americas."

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  Soft Science, or, How Cute Could Save the World

  Micol Hebron

  This article focuses on the topic of cuteness regarding the photogenic dog Mr. Winkle.

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  Foreword to Irina Yazykova, Hidden and Triumphant: The Underground Struggle to Save Russian Iconography

  Wendy Salmond

  Wendy Salmond's foreword to Irina Yazykova's Hidden and Triumphant: The Underground Struggle to Russian Iconography, in which Yazykova discusses how the art of icon painting survived during years of Russian Communism and is now poised to launch a new era that reflects modern experience.

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  How America Discovered Russian Icons: The Soviet Loan Exhibition of 1930-32

  Wendy Salmond

  On 14 October 1930, the first exhibition of Russian icons ever to take place in the United States opened at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Over the next nineteen months it traveled to nine venues across the country, introducing the American public to a form of medieval painting virtually unknown outside Russia. Billed as the "Union of Soviet Socialist Republics Loan Exhibition," its avowed goal was to share with the outside world the full story of Russian icon painting's evolution from the twelfth to the nineteenth centuries, thereby adding a vital missing chapter to the history of medieval art.

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  Introduction to Visualizing Russia: Fedor Solntsev and Crafting a National Past

  Wendy Salmond and Cynthia Hyla Whittaker

  Wendy Salmond and Cynthia Hyla Whittaker's introduction to Visualizing Russia: Fedor Solntsev and Crafting a National Past, which "elaborates the origins of the Russian style in the 1830s and 1840s and celebrates the seminal role that Fedor Grigorevich Solntsev (1801-1892) played in its development."

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  Tupi Featherwork and the Dynamics of Intercultural Exchange in Early Modern Brazil

  Amy J. Buono

  "The Tupi of sixteenth- and seventeenth century coastal Brazil were renowned as fiercely warlike and, more sensationally, as cannibals. They were also famed for their ritual featherwork capes made from scarlet ibis feathers, which were closely associated with both war and anthropophagic rituals (see figure). For the semi-nomadic Tupi, featherwork was highly valued, the capes being among the only things that they carefully preserved and carried with them as they moved from site to site."

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  Jean-Baptiste Debret’s Return of the Negro Hunters, the Brazilian Roça, and the Interstices of Empire

  Amy J. Buono

  "Despite the range of subjects that Debret illustrates, historians of Brazil have usually only reproduced his images of Afro-Brazilian slaves. This is understandable, given the political, social and economic interest in the topic and the fact that Debret is one of the few artists who portrayed the horrors of slavery in Brazil at so early date.³ The keen interest in slavery as an historical topic has also led some scholars to assume that all Afro-Brazilians depicted in Debret's volumes are slaves, when many individuals may in fact have been free.⁴ While acknowledging the importance of examining Debret's images of slavery in light of an abolitionist discourse in South America, my own interests lie more with considering the full range of images and the narrative structure of Debret's three-volume Voyage as a whole. I hope thereby to contextualize a particular image of Afro-Brazilian men, the Return of the Negro Hunters, in broader issues of colonialism and its institutions."

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  And Not Or, Kim Schoenstadt’s Composition for a Large Room in Three Parts

  Micol Hebron

  This essay focuses on the the relationship between spectator and art object as a Modernist dichotomy of author and viewer.

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  Gunther Gerzso: Chronology; Bibliography; Exhibitions; Filmography; and Scenography

  Amy J. Buono

  Dr. Buono wrote the Chronology and Bibliography, Exhibitions, Filmography, and Scenography sections for the catalogue for the "Risking the Abstract: Mexican Modernism and the Art of Gunther Gerzso" exhibition at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art.

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  Women Artists: Training and Professionalism: Russia

  Wendy Salmond

  Details the training and professionalism of women artists throughout Russian history.

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  Arts and Crafts in Late Imperial Russia: Reviving the Kustar Art Industries

  Wendy Salmond

  Arts and Crafts in Late Imperial Russia is the first account of the revival of Russia's kustar art industriespeasant crafts of wood carving, toy production, lacemaking, embroidery, and weaving - from its origins in the populist debates and philanthropic impulses of the early 1870s to its climax in 1913, with the display of its achievements at the Second All-Russian Kustar Exhibition in St. Petersburg. Like every Western nation in the late nineteenth century Russia experienced a widespread movement to revive its traditional arts and crafts. This study uncovers the complex motivations that led a broad cross section of educated Russian society to devote their money, energy, and artistic skills to save kustar arts and crafts from extinction by adapting them to satisfy the tastes of a new, well-to-do urban consumer.

  Focusing on the four major centers of kustar art production, it also examines the role of the professional artist in the creative life of the peasant artist, the place of traditional culture in modern society, and the ways in which traditional gender roles affected the production of kustar crafts.