La Sala Bologna nei Palazzi Vaticani
 La Sala Bologna nei Palazzi Vaticani: Architettura, cartografia e potere nell’età di Gregorio XIII

Nadja Aksamija (with Francesco Ceccarelli), Assistant Professor of Art History
Marsilio Editori, 2012
The Sala Bologna is one of the most inaccessible and fascinating spaces in the Vatican Palace, located between the Pope’s private apartments and the Secretariat of the Vatican State. Originally used for ceremonial purposes, it was built and decorated for the Jubilee of 1575 for the Bolognese pope Gregory XIII, Ugo Boncompagni, and precedes by five years the more famous Gallery of Maps in the Vatican Belvedere. It was conceived as part of an ambitious visual program that sought to celebrate the scientific and religious accomplishments of Gregory XIII’s court. The Sala Bologna’s majestic interior was frescoed by Lorenzo Sabatini and artists in his workshop with monumental terrestrial and celestial maps, among which the map of the city of Bologna – the largest “portrait” of a city painted during the Renaissance. This book presents for the first time the architecture and pictorial decoration of this magnificent space, which is studied from a variety of angles by a group of internationally renowned scholars. The extraordinary images published in the book are a result of an exhaustive photographic campaign by the Madrid studio Factum Arte that were also used for the production of a facsimile of the map of the city of Bologna for the new Museo della Storia di Bologna.

 

Beth Sholom Synagogue: Frank Lloyd Wright and Modern Religious Architecture
 Beth Sholom Synagogue: Frank Lloyd Wright and Modern Religious Architecture

Joseph Siry, Professor of Art History
University of Chicago Press, 2012
In a suburb just north of Philadelphia stands Beth Sholom Synagogue, Frank Lloyd Wright’s only synagogue and among his finest religious buildings. Designated a National Historic Landmark in 2007, Beth Sholom was one of Wright’s last completed projects, and for years it has been considered one of his greatest masterpieces. But its full story has never been told. Beth Sholom Synagogue provides the first in-depth look at the synagogue’s conception and realization in relation to Wright’s other religious architecture. Beginning with his early career at Adler and Sullivan’s architectural firm in Chicago and his design for Unity Temple and ending with the larger works completed just before or soon after his death, Joseph M. Siry skillfully depicts Wright’s exploration of geometric forms and structural techniques in creating architecture for worshipping communities. Siry also examines Wright’s engagement with his clients, whose priorities stemmed from their denominational identity, and the effect this had on his designs—his client for Beth Sholom, Rabbi Mortimer Cohen, worked with Wright to anchor the building in the traditions of Judaism even as it symbolized the faith’s continuing life in postwar America. With each of his religious projects, Wright considered questions of social history and cultural identity as he advanced his program for an expressive, modern American architecture. His search to combine these agendas culminated in Beth Sholom, where the interplay of light, form, and space create a stunning and inspiring place of worship.

 

The Forgotten Diaspora The Forgotten Diaspora: Jewish Communities in West Africa and the Making of the Atlantic World

Peter Mark (with José da Silva Horta), Professor of Art History
Cambridge University Press, 2011
This study traces the history of early 17th-century Portuguese Sephardic traders who settled in two communities on Senegal's Petite Côte. There, they lived as public Jews, under the spiritual guidance of a rabbi sent to them by the newly established Portuguese Jewish community in Amsterdam. In Senegal, the Jews were protected from agents of the Inquisition by local Muslim rulers. The Petite Côte communities included several Jews of mixed Portuguese-African heritage as well as African wives, offspring, and servants. The blade weapons trade was an important part of their commercial activities. These merchants participated marginally in the slave trade but fully in the arms trade, illegally supplying West African markets with swords. The book not only discovers previously unknown Jewish communities but by doing so offers a reinterpretation of the dynamics and processes of identity construction throughout the Atlantic world.

 

Art in Renaissance Italy
 Art in Renaissance Italy

John T. Paoletti (with Gary M. Radke), Professor of Art History, Emeritus
Prentice Hall; 4th edition, 2011
Art mattered in the Renaissance... People expected painting, sculpture, architecture, and other forms of visual art to have a meaningful effect on their lives,” write the authors of this introduction to Italian Renaissance art. A glance at the pages of Art in Renaissance Italy shows at once its freshness and breadth of approach, which includes thorough explanation into how and why works of art, buildings, prints, and other forms of visual production came to be. The authors also discuss how men and women of the Renaissance regarded art and artists, why works of Renaissance art look the way they do, and what this means to us. Unlike other books on the subject, this one covers not only Florence and Rome, but also Venice and the Veneto, Assisi, Siena, Milan, Pavia, Padua, Mantua, Verona, Ferrara, Urbino, and Naples—each governed in a distinctly different manner, every one with individual, political, and social structures that inevitably affected artistic styles. Spanning more than three centuries, the narrative brings to life the rich tapestry of Italian Renaissance society and the art that is its enduring legacy. Throughout, special features, including textual sources from the period and descriptions of social rituals, evoke and document the people and places of this dynamic age.

 

The Nabis and Intimate Modernism The Nabis and Intimate Modernism: Painting and the Decorative at the Fin-de-Siecle

Katherine Kuenzli, Associate Professor of Art History
Ashgate Publishing, 2010
Providing a fresh perspective on an important but underappreciated group of late 19th-century French painters, this book is an in-depth account of the Nabis’ practice of the decorative and its significance for 20th-century modernism. Over the course of the ten years that define the Nabi movement (1890–1900), its principal artists included Edouard Vuillard, Pierre Bonnard, Maurice Denis, Paul Sérusier, and Paul Ranson. Kuenzli reconstructs the Nabis’ relationship to Impressionism, mass culture, literary Symbolism, Art Nouveau, Wagnerianism, and a revolutionary artistic tradition in order to show how their painterly practice emerges out of the pressing questions defining modernism around 1900. She reveals that the Nabis were engaged with issues that are always at stake in accounts of 19th-century modernist painting, issues such as the relationship of high and low art, of individual sensibility and collective identity, of the public and private spheres.

 

Renaissance Florence
 Renaissance Florence: A Social History

John T. Paoletti (with Roger J. Crum), Professor of Art History, Emeritus
Cambridge University Press, 2008
This book examines the social history of Florence during the critical period of its growth and development in the early modern period, from the fourteenth through sixteenth centuries. Treating the city, its art, and its rituals as lived experiences that extended through space and time, the contributors to this volume consider well-known objects, monuments, sites, and events in the vivifying context of a variety of spaces, which are here understood as a dimension of physical, psychological, religious, and political perceptions for the city of Florence during the Renaissance. The volume provides a multi-dimensional view of Florence as it evolved into an economic powerhouse and dynamic center of artistic achievement, as well as the setting for political and religious struggles. It also demonstrates how permeable boundaries between the disciplines of history and art history have become.

 

The Chicago Auditorium Building The Chicago Auditorium Building: Adler and Sullivan's Architecture and the City

Joseph Siry, Professor of Art History
University of Chicago Press, 2004
When the magnificent Auditorium Building opened on Chicago's Michigan Avenue in December 1889, American and European newspapers hailed the event as a defining moment for the city, the most important since the Great Fire of 1871. The Auditorium marked Chicago's emergence both as the leading city of the Midwest and as a metropolis of international stature. In this lavishly illustrated book, Joseph M. Siry explores not just the architectural history of the Auditorium Building, but also the crucial role it played in Chicago's social history. Housing a luxurious 400-room hotel, 136 offices and stores, and a theater that could seat 4,200, the Auditorium Building was one of the earliest multipurpose civic centers in the United States, and its many technical and aesthetic innovations launched Dankmar Adler and Louis Sullivan's national reputation as creators of highly innovative architecture for large public buildings. (Frank Lloyd Wright was employed by Adler and Sullivan at the time, serving as Sullivan's draftsman.) But the Auditorium;s importance was not limited to architecture. Envisioned by its principal patron, Ferdinand W. Peck, as a means to counter the violent socialist agitation of the Haymarket era, the Auditorium Theater embodied Peck's capitalist ideal of a democratic variation on the European opera house that could provide affordable, high-class entertainment for the city's skilled workers. Covering the Auditorium from the early design to its opening, its later renovations, its links to culture and politics in Chicago, and its influence on later Adler and Sullivan works (including the Schiller Building and the Chicago Stock Exchange Building), The Chicago Auditorium Building recounts the fascinating tale of a building that helped to define a city and an era.

 

Saint-Jean-des-Vignes in Soissons
 Saint-Jean-des-Vignes in Soissons, Approaches to its Architecture, Archaeology and History (Series: Biblioteca Victorina, XV)

Clark Maines (with S. Bonde, E. Boyden and K. Jackson-Lualdi; co-edited with S. Bonde), Professor of Art History
Brepols Press, 2003
The Augustinian abbey of Saint-Jean-des-Vignes was the first monastic house founded in the diocese of Soissons during the reform movement of the 11th and 12th centuries. It played an important rôle in the architectural, technological and social history of its region until the French Revolution. The book is organized them thematically. Part I explores the various sources for study of the abbey, including standing architectural remains, archaeological material, archival sources and pictorial representations. Part II engages with the foundation of the abbey, the acquisition of its landed domain and the development of its parish. Part III considers first the Romanesque and then the Gothic phases of construction. The changing plan of the abbey is traced, and the ways in which construction influenced the functional life of the monastic community is treated. Using the unpublished customary, Part IV explores the ritual aspects of daily existence as it was lived in the Gothic chapter room and refectory. The final section, Part V, engages with infrastructure and daily life, through study of the medieval and early modern water management system at the abbey. Throughout these chapters, the focus remains both on the site of Saint-Jean-des-Vignes, and on the significant rôle it played in the larger context of regional religious life, monastic settlement, and artistic as well as economic patronage from the eleventh to the seventeenth centuries.

 

Vijayanagara
 Vijayanagara: Architectural Inventory of the Sacred Centre, 3 volumes
(Vijayanagara Research Project Monograph Series, Volume 8)

Phillip B. Wagoner (with George Michell), Professor of Art History
New Delhi: Manohar and American Institute of Indian Studies, 2001
This architectural inventory documents all the structures of the Sacred Centre of Vijayanagara, the great ruined Hindu capital on the Tungabhadra river in central Karnataka. The Sacred Centre is of outstanding interest from the historical and religious point of view, since it is the oldest part of the Vijayanagara site, with shrines dating back to the ninth century AD. With the establishment of the capital by the Sangamas in the fourteenth century, it was the Sacred Centre that was first developed, with much building activity occurring around the Virupaksha sanctuary in Hampi. As the capital expanded under the Sangamas and Tuluvas in the course of the fifteenth and first half of the sixteenth centuries, other significant religious monuments were established in the Sacred Centre, especially in the urban quarters of Hampi, Krishnapura, Achyutapura, and Vitthalapura. Scattered along the south bank of the Tungabhadra over a distance of some 5 km, these monuments fully illustrate the evolution of the Vijayanagara architectural style. The inventory is based on more than twenty years of field work conducted by teams of architects and art historians under the guidance of the authors. It describes more than 400 structures, ranging from large-scale temple complexes, such as those dedicated to Virupaksha, Balakrishna, Tiruvengalanatha and Vitthala, to simpler and smaller shrines consecrated to a variety of deities, as well as mandapas, gateways, water features and other structures, most of which are reproduced here for the first time. The architectural descriptions, location maps, measured drawings, and photographs are divided into three volumes.

 

Unity Temple
 Unity Temple: Frank Lloyd Wright and Architecture for Liberal Religion

Joseph Siry, Professor of Art History
Cambridge University Press, 1998
Unity Temple: Frank Lloyd Wright and Architecture for Liberal Religion is the first in-depth study of one of the seminal works of America's most renowned twentieth-century architect. Joseph Siry examines Unity Temple in light of Wright's earlier religious architecture, his methods of design, and his innovative construction techniques. Unity Temple is treated as a work of art that embodies both Wright's theory of architecture and liberal religious ideals.

 

Tidings of the King
 Tidings of the King: A Translation and Ethnohistorical Analysis of the Rayavacakamu

Phillip B. Wagoner, Professor of Art History
University of Hawai’i Press, 1993
Tidings of the King presents an annotated translation and study of the Rayavacakamu, a medieval South Indian historiographic text in Telugu dealing with the reign of Krishnadevaraya (f.1509-1529), the best-known ruler of the Vijayanagara empire. Although often taken to be a contemporary document of Krishnadevaraya’s period, the Rayavacakamu is in fact a historiographic representation of that period written some ninety years later at the Nayaka court of Madurai, one of Vijayanagara’s most important successor states. In his ethnohistorical introduction, Phillip Wagoner argues that one of the primary purposes of the text is to articulate an ideological argument for the political legitimacy of the Madurai Nayaka regime. By historicizing Madurai’s relationship of subordination to Vijayanagara, the text affirms Nayaka legitimacy at the same time that it denies the authority of the contemporaneous Vijayanagara rulers of the Aravidu house. According to the implications of the text, the rulers of this last Vijayanagara dynasty were perceived in Madurai as bereft of ritual authority due to their loss of the fundamental source of that authority: the city of Vijayanagara itself, destroyed in 1565 by a coalition of Muslim forces.

 

Carson Pirie Scott
 Carson Pirie Scott: Louis Sullivan and the Chicago Department Store

Joseph Siry, Professor of Art History
University of Chicago Press, 1988
Long recognized as a Chicago landmark, the Carson Pirie Scott Building also represents a milestone in the development of architecture. The last large commercial structure designed by Louis Sullivan, the Carson building reflected the culmination of the famed architect's career as a creator of tall steel buildings. In this study, Joseph Siry traces the origins of the building's design and analyzes its role in commercial, urban, and architectural history.

 

The Critical Eye/I
 The Critical Eye/I

John T. Paoletti (with Victor Burgin, Gilbert & George, Mary Kelly, Richard Long, Bruce McLean, David Tremlett), Professor of Art History, Emeritus
Yale Center for British Art, 1984
Exhibition catalogue published in conjunction with exhibition held May 16 - June 15, 1984. Includes artists Victor Burgin, Gilbert & George, Mary Kelly, Richard Long, Bruce McLean, and David Tremlett. Consists of eight paperback booklets in a printed cardboard box, incorporating a 48-page catalogue by John T. Paoletti and an accompanying bibliography, as well as an artists' publications by each of the selected artists. The artists' publications take a variety of forms such as artists' books, folded poster (Long) and a facsimile diary (Kelly).