The Politics of Taste: Artistic Migration and Reception in Pre-Modern Europe
1. In Pursuit of Higher Ideal: Dutch Art and Italian Renaissance in the Sixteenth Century
This part seeks to explore the ways in which new trends evolved in Italian Renaissan...
The Politics of Taste: Artistic Migration and Reception in Pre-Modern Europe
1. In Pursuit of Higher Ideal: Dutch Art and Italian Renaissance in the Sixteenth Century
This part seeks to explore the ways in which new trends evolved in Italian Renaissance art and local traditions in Holland combined to produce a unique style in Dutch religious painting in the sixteenth century. With a particular emphasis on the altarpieces painted by Maerten van Heemskerck, this article addresses the question of how Heemskerck's trip to Italy influenced his career and developments in artistic communities in Holland. In detail, it will investigate how the features of Italian Renaissance art modified his practice in terms of style and iconography after his Italian sojourn by comparing them with his paintings completed before the journey as well as with some contemporary paintings of the Dutch school in currency.
2. Cretan School of Painting in Venice and Post-Byzantine Art in the Seventeenth Century
The second part of the project deals with the stylistic developments and reception of Cretan icon painters active in Western Europe after the fall of Crete in 1669. It will be argued that Greeks' efforts to safeguard their national identity at peril as a result of the collapse of the Byzantine Empire characterize the Cretan school's distinctive trait of intermixing Greek style (alla greca) and Western European style (alla latina) in their painting. Although both styles were sometimes equally employed in a single work, the dominance of one style over the other in response to clients' class and taste was more common. In particular, Cretan painters based in Greek migrant communities in Venice concomitantly developed Renaissance pictorial style and conventional Byzantine style to meet the taste of Venetian clientele, and it in turn engineered their success in expanding their markets to include mainland Italy and the Ottoman Empire.
3. Artistic Exchange between Germany and Italy: Algarotti and the Dresden State Gallery (Staatsgalerie Dresden)
Based on the case of Dresden State Gallery's history and collection, this study aims to elucidate the foundations of modern gallery systems and relevant art theories formulated in the Enlightenment by analyzing the changing patterns of purchase, exchange, and display of artworks in the eighteenth century. To do this, it focuses on the contributions made by Francesco Algarotti and several other art administrators to the radical reformation of art gallery systems, which was required in the wake of the emergence of nation-state and elevated perception of art at court. In order to retrieve the significance of the new art gallery system proposed by Algarotti, this study scrutinizes the documents and correspondences he left behind as well as the actual artworks he helped to purchase for the gallery.
4. Marooned on a Desert Island: Continental European Artists in Eighteenth-Century British Royal Academy
This section of the project attempts to chart the tidal shift in artistic taste in late eighteenth-century Britain by looking into the activities of continental European artists active in Britain and into the changing perceptions of them in the British mind. In recognition of the structural transformation of the artistic public sphere in this pivotal era in the history of Western art, this study highlights the roles played by foreign artists in the formation of artistic cosmopolitanism on the one hand and of British cultural identity on the other. To further the investigation in detail, it seeks to raise and answer the following questions: who these alien artists were and what brought them to Britain; in what genre they specialized and what they had in common with native British artists; who patronized them and what their social backgrounds were like; what kinds of public responses these foreign artists elicited in British press and how they changed.