Northwestern Art Review | Issue 17: Art (Her)Story

NAR

ISSUE 17 | SPRING 2017

art (her) story

NAR | 1

NAR ‘16- ‘17 MASTHEAD

EXECUTIVE BOARD

President | Chloe Gardner Print Editor in Chief | Andrea Herskowich Online Editor in Chief | Helen Murphy Director of Design | Emily Kappes Director of Public Relations | Isabel Schwartz Director of Finance | Emily Hollingworth Director of Social Media | Caroline Bell STAFF

Grace Devlin Nicole Fallert Ilana Herzig Rachel Holtzman Charlotte Hu Anna Kubacsek Catherine Malloy Sena Oktem Natalie Pertsovsky Elizabeth Philip Kylie Richards Kate Slosburg Bradley Smith Jacob Stern Isabel Schwartz Balim Tezel Carolyn Twersky Faye O Yang NAR | 2

Letter from the President Dear Reader, This year, the world has seen a powerful assurance of feminine force. Since January, millions of impassioned people have rallied in cities around the globe to assert the strength, power, equality and importance of women in the workforce, in politics, even in the home. Everywhere and anywhere, we are reminded: women are needed and women are valuable.

Consider the many images that graced the front pages of newspapers and websites covering these marches and rallies… Visually, what do they have in common? They all show gatherers proudly jutting posters and banners and handmade signs in the air. This is art in action. These millions of people went to stores, bought poster boards and pens and paint, and went home to carefully craft their messages to be presented with defiant pride. The images from the marches and rallies present a tapestry of the public’s artistic manifestations of their beliefs, demands and cries. These posters are powerful. These posters are made by women, for women, and if you pay attention, you realize that art— women’s art— is all around.

We hope that you enjoy NAR’s Spring Journal, as we certainly enjoyed reading the work of our talented writers and compiling their pieces into this journal. To us editors, the theme this year jumped out at us, as it seemed particularly salient given current events of late. We hope that the messages, stories and histories of our writers make you smile, think and resonate with you beyond your first perusal of the journal.

As always, a big hats off to our inimitable Editor-in-Chief Andrea Herskowich and the immensely talented Director of Design, Emmy Kappes. Thank you to my lovely NAR team—they say the whole is only as good as the sum of its parts. How lucky for us! Together, this journal is our creation and we sincerely hope that you enjoy!

Chloe Gardner President

NAR | 3

Letter from the Editor Dear Reader, Taking you back through the ages of the art world, allow Northwestern Art Review to guide and help you answers to questions like these: Ever wonder about the abundance of naked male statues in the Classical section of your favorite museum? Have you noticed how images of women unravel how self identity is an unstable compromise between social dictates and personal intentions in eras of intense consumerism and image proliferation? How did those “bad boy” artists of the twentieth century make it even harder for a girl to get a break?

Thanks to the wonderful entries for NAR’s seventeenth journal, we can evaluate female renderings and roles throughout art history as we know it.

The colorful reinterpretations in this “Art Herstory” issue are part of a much-needed initiative to reimagine art and an unabashed celebration of female artists and female representations. At this journal’s core is a spectrum of women throughout the world that have participated in the visual arts in diverse and stimulating ways.

Whether as creators and innovators of numerous forms of artistic expression, or significant contributors to the discipline of art history, women have been and continue to be integral to the institution of art.

From understanding how Tang poetry engaged floral imagery and compared women to the flowers that eventually fade with time, how Leonardo da Vinci’s studies of the female body in Leda and the Swan transcend the natural world, and to how artists like Marisol challenge the vulnerable position of the spectator’s gaze as female artists, the art mentioned challenges normative art historical styles. The essays included in this issue explore the social investments in cultural values and recognize the roles of gender in social formations. While recognizing the differences and that the term “women” is not a uniform and essentialist category, this subject guide offers a sampling of women’s important and exciting participation in the visual arts from a range of cultures and periods and in various mediums and forms.

As a spokesperson for the Northwestern Art Review, I would like to extend acknowledgments to Chloe Gardner, the president whose constant support made the production of this journal possible. I would also like to extend a huge appreciation to Emmy Kappes, our talented Director of Design who put together and designed this beautiful journal layout. Additionally, I would like to thank the editorial team for making the selection process for this journal efficient and memorable.

This journal edition represents the talented and well-written essays of students from universities around the globe. On behalf of Northwester Art Review, I would like to thank each and every student who submitted their work to the journal—these individuals and their appreciation for the arts keep our journal relevant and thriving, extending the discourse among the driving themes of this journal. I am so fortunate to have been involved with such a wonderful organization and the assembly of this Spring journal.

Andrea Herskowich Editor-in-Chief (Journal)

NAR | 4

In The Issue 6

Diane Arbus: Artist as Anthropologist and the Conflation of Difference JACK RADLEY | WASH U ‘18

12

Self-Representation and the Look in Marisol’s Dinner Date and Helen Chadwick’s Vanity HANNAH FAGIN | PENN ‘17

16

The Manipulation of the Female Nude BRADLEY SMITH | NU ‘18

20

Leonardo’s Leda: An Experience of Art’s Transcendence NATALIE EDWARDS | WASH U ‘18

24

Women and Flowers in Ladies Wearing Flowered Headdresses & Tang Poetry ELISSA SCHMIEL | WELLESLEY ‘19

NAR | 5

DIANE ARBUS: ARTIST AS ANTHROPOLOGIST AND THE CONFLATION OF DIFFERENCE jack radley | wash u ‘18 “Freaks was a thing I photographed a lot. It was one of the first things I photographed and it had a terrific kind of excitement for me. I just used to adore them. I still do adore some of them. I don’t quite mean they’re my best friends but they made me feel a mixture of shame and awe. There’s a quality of legend about freaks… Freaks were born with their trauma.

They’ve already passed their test in life. They’re aristocrats.”

–Diane Arbus, An Aperture Monograph (1972) 1

Diane Arbus’ 1960s photographs of “freaks” – a word

she frequently used to describe any member of a minority community – have been widely heralded as making visible those traditionally on the outskirts of photography.

In her own words, “I really believe there are things which nobody would see unless I photographed them.”2 In 1970 she received The Robert Leavitt Award from the American Society of Magazine Photographers “for her revelation of truth in the ‘found’ individual, who might not be noticed, otherwise, by the less observant.”3 However, we must stop confusing visibility with representation. Arbus’ use of the singular third person “was” evidences her larger treatment of “freaks” as a sensationalized concept, and not as individual human beings. If this critical acclaim is truly concerned with the advancement of minority groups through their representation in the arts, we must examine the content of these individuals’ depiction by Arbus. In 1972 her iconic Aperture Monograph was published posthumously, which first gave the general public the ability to view Arbus’ work. This single book included nudists, trans women, the elderly, people with mental disabilities, Jews, giants, dwarves, carnival performers, identical twins, ethnic minorities, and the extremely wealthy (among others). As we begin to consider how Arbus represents these individuals, I propose that we redirect the criticism that privileges Arbus’ ability to “find” or expose

NAR | 6

these individuals; we must reexamine how she depicts them. In her monograph Arbus casts a wide net over so many individuals that she ignores the nuances of each identity and disregards the difference between minority and marginalized groups.

Through an investigation of her personal and public writings, I will examine Arbus’ attempt to decrease the gap between her wealthy white female identity and those of her ethnic/racial minority subjects, specifically individuals of Puerto Rican identities. Beyond referring to “freaks” as “aristocrats” for their trauma, Arbus goes as far as to try to equate her experience as a socioeconomic minority of great affluence to the experience of ethnic minorities, ignoring her own privilege.4 In this way, Arbus does not disidentify5 with her well-off identity in relationship to her depiction of racial minorities. Instead, she hyperidentifies with it by equating the two; this ultimately reduces and ignores the suffering of ethnic/racial minorities.

In 1964 paperwork for the Museum of Modern Art, Arbus described her “Special Field of Interest in Photography” as “a kind of contemporary anthropology.”6 Exploring her work as “anthropology,” I will evaluate Arbus as an anthropologist, which I define as an individual who examines the comparative study of human cultures with intended objectivity. By analyzing Arbus’ work as evidence of her attempted anthropology, I argue that her attempt to compare two subcultures, her personal white affluence and racial/ethnic minorities,7 ultimately privileges her own role as the observer and unjustly conflates a minority and a marginalized identity.

Arbus’ depiction of the extremely wealthy stems from her own identification with this subculture. She writes extensively on her anxiety about her family’s extreme wealth, deriving from their success as owners of the famous 5th Avenue department store, Russek’s. In a 1968

Fig 1: DiAne arbus, a Family on Their Lawn One Sunday in Westchester, NY, 1968.

photo credit: Gagosian

NAR | 7

Diane Arbus, A Puerto Rican Housewife, 1963.

NAR | 8

interview recounting the Depression, Arbus recalls: “The family fortune always seemed to me humiliating. When I had to go into that store… it was like being a princess in some loathsome movie of some kind of Transylvanian obscure middle European country and the kingdom was so humiliating.”8 These feelings of humiliation and shame are not evidence of marginalization, as her wealth did not engender a public view of her insignificance (but, rather, her import). They should not be equated to sentiments from systemic racial marginalization because of the privileges and security that came with her wealth, despite perceived ostracization. The Depression accentuated her wealthy socioeconomic status and insulated Arbus from the national struggles of many.

Arbus misconstrues her own struggles with those of systemic, racial injustice in the flippant, elitist remarks of a 1960 postcard to friend Marvin Israel. Arbus proclaimed: “Our bourgeois heritage seems to me glorious as any stigma, especially to see it reflected back and forth in the mirror of each other… ours is just perhaps more hilarious than to have been Negro or midget. It always makes me laugh in the middle of some unbelievable instant to think how our parents would approve of each other. That is the joke we are on them and us and it. [sic] To be so Jewish and rich and middle class and from good families and to run so variously away from it that we come full circle and bump into each other.” 9 Arbus directly equates her “glorious… stigma” of wealth with “Negro” struggles; she even refers to her “stigma” as “hilarious” (a “joke”). The oppression of racial/ethnic minorities, especially during the 1960s when Arbus photographed these subjects, is neither funny nor comparable to her own experience. However, Arbus wrote in a letter to Marvin Israel, who shared her wealthy Jewish identity, that different subcultures make the world “[seem]… not so much small as done with mirrors.”10 She tries to find her own reflection in the struggles of racial/ethnic minorities, and she directly parallels these experiences in the monograph. While being extremely wealthy may make Arbus a minority, she does not suffer marginalization, an unjust, disadvantageous social exclusion.

Diane Arbus’ A family on their lawn one Sunday in Westchester, N.Y. (1968)11 depicts a family of considerable wealth, similar to her own. Two parents lounge on lawn chairs while ignoring each other, appearing devoid of responsibility or worry. Arbus depicts them as inactive, sprawled out amidst the vast landscape that boasts their ownership of the land. Arbus positions all three of the figures in the same frame, in each other’s company, though they may not acknowledge each other’s existence. On the contrary, her depiction of ethnic minorities, specifically Puerto Rican women, is far less luxurious. Arbus’ Puerto

Rican Housewife (1963)12 illustrates a woman identified by her Puerto Rican ethnicity and role as a housewife.

The only sign of a family appears in the form of an expensive wedding ring on her hand. However, she appears dissatisfied; grimacing, she looks above to the camera, which establishes a power dynamic between photographer and subject (and ultimately between viewer and subject).

Arbus sexualizes this figure much more than the woman in the Westchester family; she positions the “Puerto Rican Housewife” on a bed with dark makeup and centers the photograph at her cleavage. Arbus shoots her in an interior domestic space without company or purpose, thus further emphasizing the only company in the room: Arbus herself.

To complicate this, in a 1968 note to friend Peter Crookston, Arbus claims: “I am pure housewife.”13 Thus, she sees herself in the role played by the Puerto Rican woman and ignores the inferior position that 1960s white audience would likely assign to a Puerto Rican individual.

Another example of Arbus’ depiction of a Puerto Rican woman from her Aperture Monograph is Puerto Rican Woman with a Beauty Mark (1965).14 Despite her mark, Arbus does not depict this woman as beautiful. Her hair wraps fully around her face in a disheveled manner.

The woman grimaces with a gaze that looks beyond the viewer, as if dissatisfied with what is in front of her. Arbus depicts a tight shot of the woman’s face, as if her ethnicity is her only identifier or purpose. Arbus intended to include his photograph in “Ethnic Beauties,” a series she shot that problematically qualified beauty based on ethnicity.15

Arbus describes her general practice of photographing the “Other” as performative insincerity. She writes that if she were just an ordinary person trying to get into people’s lives, they would be “guarded… but the camera is a kind of license.”16 She leverages her position as photographer to gain access into traditionally private lives, and she is very conscious of how her actions, albeit insincere, affect these relationships. In her monograph, she boasts to the public: “I’m extremely likeable with them [sic] I think I’m kind of two-faced. I’m very ingratiating.

It really kind of annoys me. I’m sort of a little too nice. I hear myself saying, “How terrific,” and there’s this woman making a face. I really mean it’s terrific.”17 Arbus’ photographic process is ultimately one of deception. While Arbus does not write specifically on her process of shooting the Puerto Rican women in her photographs, she echoes her ugly depiction of the woman with a beauty mark (and its irony) in her sarcastic, mocking description of her subjects as “terrific” (or terrifying.

Walter Benjamin, one of the most prominent cultural critics of photography during Arbus’ time, writes on the ethical role of the privileged producer in his 1934 essay “The Author as Producer.” Benjamin claims: “The place of the intellectual in the class struggle can only be determined, or better still chosen, on the basis of his position within the

NAR | 9

production process.”18 We must consider Arbus’ own “position within the production process” of her photographs to determine the ethics of speaking on her subjects’ behalf (by displaying them to the public). No matter the specific identity of the “freak” subject, Arbus writes, “There’s some sense in which I always identify with them.”19 However, these differences are incomparable and highlight Arbus’ own privilege within and beyond the photographs. Arbus claims, “One of the things I felt I suffered from as a kid was I never felt adversity.”20 In the wake of this statement, we can view Arbus’ depiction of and identification with various minority subjects as a self-indulgent attempt to alleviate anxieties about her own identity.

As I have already noted, Arbus described her own practice as a kind of “anthropology.” The early 1960s saw a great shift in anthropology: from a scientific methodology to a political ideology.21 In this manner, Arbus attempts a cultural anthropology by describing the sameness of difference in her photographs. However, Arbus abandons the objective position of the anthropologist as scientist in favor for the biased position of the politicized anthropologist in using her work as a cultural depiction that draws on her own identity. In his 1975 essay, Artist as Anthropologist, Joseph Kosuth writes: “Now what may be interesting about the artist-as- anthropologist is that the artist’s activity is not outside, but a mapping of an internalizing cultural activity in his own society.”22 While Arbus herself may not appear in her photographs, her subjects’ gazes and their accumulation into a monograph draw a focus to her activity of photographing them. She “[maps] an internalizing cultural activity in [her] own society;” Arbus may exist in the same society as marginalized Puerto Rican women, but they are not in her own cultural group and she does not know their struggles. In Michel Foucault’s 1966 The Order of Things, he writes: “‘Anthropologization’ is the great internal threat to knowledge in our day.”23 Understanding Foucault’s definition of knowledge through his idea of le savoir-pouvoir, power shapes and creates knowledge.24 Thus, Arbus’ role in “Anthropologization” as the anthropologist who emphasizes her own privilege to relate to her minoritarian subjects “threatens” knowledge. These subjects were not traditionally viewed in high art, and thus by positioning them all together, she flattens their individuality and dismisses their own experiences. This reinforces a power structure in which the subjects are lesser than the viewers, who may be first encountering public depictions of these individuals. While Arbus can position herself as anthropologist, she tries to extend her role to ethnographer, a person who studies people and cultures through the point of view of the subjects’ experiences.

Hal Foster problematizes this stance in his 1995 essay, The Artist as Ethnographer?,25 Foster probes: “Is this moral masochism a disguised version of ‘ideological patronage’? Is it resentment to a second degree, a position of

NAR | 10

power in the pretense of its surrender? Is it another way to maintain the centrality of the subject through the other?”26 Arbus’ masochistic writings of her socioeconomic stigma as “perhaps more hilarious than to have been Negro or midget” cannot be confused for a patronage of making individuals visible that is worth any merit. In this way, Arbus manifests her own “position of power” and the “centrality of [herself] through the other” by using her own struggle to justify her position in their representation. Our viewing of the photographs cannot ignore the fact that Arbus took them, implicating her own identity and positioning the subject as object in relationship to the artist.

Ultimately, Arbus’ depictions of black and Puerto Rican individuals makes these human beings visible where they might traditionally not be; however, Arbus does not explore these people as individuals, but rather as titular signifiers of difference. Their photographic compilation in the Aperture Monograph compresses their differences in a tight package for the consumption of a largely white audience. We must also consider that these photographs are staged and not documentary.27 This notion refutes the idea that Arbus captures these images of individuals in a ‘pure’ state; she crafts and composes their depiction (and thus reception). She dangerously casts a wide net for all “freaks” through the disparaging word and the monographic reduction of their differences. Foster writes: This idealization of otherness tends to follow a temporal line in which one group is privileged as the new subject of history, only to be displaced by another, a chronology that may collapse not only different differences (social, ethnic, sexual, and so on) but also different positions within each difference. The result is a politics that may consume its historical subjects before they become historically effective.28

Arbus’ photographs of minority groups, including those marginalized for their racial/ethnic identities, masochistically idealize “Otherness” and collapse their unique positions. To be truly progressive and make her work “historically effective” Arbus would have been better off capturing the spectrum of experience within each minority identity (or at least giving the individuals in her Aperture Monograph signifiers other than their differences, such as a name). Instead, she employed marginalized individuals’ identities as a stand-in for their entire subcultures, conflating every minority identity (including her own) as a metonymic signifier of difference.29 Arbus’ writings on her photographs raise questions about the ethics of authorship, racial politics, and authenticity; these beckon us to distinguish visibility and representation as we consider her authorial presence in the photographs and our own viewership of them.

FOOTNOTES Diane Arbus, Diane Arbus: An Aperture Monograph (New York: Aperture, 1972), 3.

1

2

Ibid, 15.

“American Society of Magazine Photographers, Honors and Awards for 1970,” Infinity, September 1970, 16-17.

3

While some may argue that Arbus held another minority identity as someone struggling with mental health, citing her eventual suicide, I do not see this explicitly in Arbus’ own writings at the time of these photographs, which I will examine as the central evidence for my argument. Additionally, I am not qualified to assess Arbus’ own mental health, and I wish to redirect the suicide’s canonical tainting of her oeuvre.

4

For more on disidentification as a strategy to navigate one’s own (perceived, in the case of Arbus) marginalized identity, see José Esteban Muñoz, Disidentificaitons: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999).

5

Elisabeth Sussman and Doon Arbus, Diane Arbus: A Chronology, 1923–1971, (New York: Aperture, 2011), 47.

6

Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (New York, 1966), 348.

23

Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977, (New York: Doubleday, 1980).

24

Though Foster is specifically writing on later works of the 1970s/80s, the problems he outlines regarding this position transcend time periods.

25

Hal Foster, “The Artist as Ethnographer?” in The Return of the Real (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996), 277.

26

27

Arbus, A Chronology, 56.

28

Foster, “The Artist as Ethnographer?” 179.

In her Aperture Monograph, she writes: “There are an awful lot of people in the world and it’s going to be terribly hard to photograph all of them, so if I photograph some kind of generalized human being, everybody’ll recognize it,” 2.

29

WORKS CITED

7

“American Society of Magazine Photographers, Honors and Awards for 1970.” Infinity, September 1970.

8

Arbus, A Chronology, 3.

Arbus, Diane. Diane Arbus: An Aperture Monograph. New York: Aperture, 1972.

9

Arbus, A Chronology, 23.

Racial/ethnic minorities are not one subculture and obviously include a spectrum of experiences and cultures, but Arbus does not explore these nuances.

10

Ibid, 28.

11

See Figure 1.

12

See Figure 2.

13

Arbus, A Chronology, 66.

14

See Figure 3.

Arbus, A Chronology, 50.

15 16

Arbus, An Aperture Monograph, 1.

17

Ibid.

Walter Benjamin, “The Author as Producer” in Thinking Photography ed. Victor Burgin, (London: Macmillan, 1982), 22.

18

19

Arbus, An Aperture Monograph, 12.

20

Ibid, 5.

Chris Martin, “How the 1960s Changed Anthropology,” Heterodox Academy. Accessed December 16, 2016. http:// heterodoxacademy.org/2016/03/10/how-the-1960s-changedanthropology/.

21

Benjamin, Walter. “The Author as Producer” in Thinking Photography ed. VictorBurgin. London: Macmillan, 1982.

Foster, Hal. “The Artist as Ethnographer?” in The Return of the Real. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996.

Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things. New York: Random House, 1966.

Foucault, Michel. Power Knowledge: Selected Interviews and OtherWritings, 1972¬1977. New York: Doubleday, 1980.

Kosuth, Joseph. “The Artist as Anthropologist.” ed. Stephen Johnstone. The Everyday: Documents of Contemporary Art. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008.

Martin, Chris. “How the 1960s Changed Anthropology.” Heterodox Academy.

Sussman, Elisabeth and Doon Arbus. Diane Arbus: A Chronology, 1923–1971. New York: Aperture, 2011.

Joseph Kosuth, “The Artist as Anthropologist,” ed. Stephen Johnstone, The Everyday: Documents of Contemporary Art (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008), 183.

22

NAR | 11

FIG 1: MARISOL, DINNER DATE, 1963.

NAR | 12

SELF-REPRESENTATION AND THE LOOK IN MARISOL’S DINNER DATE AND HELEN CHADWICK’S VANITY hannah fagin | upenn ‘17 The Venezuelan-American artist Marisol, born Maria Sol

Escobar, was often criticized for her “narcissistic” impulse of including her own face on her sculptural figures. Her 1963 sculpture Dinner Date is of this body of works, which depicts two seated women both with Marisol’s face, eating TV dinners together at a square table. The British artist Helen Chadwick also includes herself in her work, evident in her 1986 cibachrome photograph, Vanity, in which she depicts her nude body in front of a circular mirror that reflects her instillation The Oval Court in the background.

Through their self-representation, Marisol and Chadwick place themselves in a vulnerable position to the spectator’s gaze, especially as female artists. However, their self-awareness allows them to negotiate the politics of the self and reconfirm their position as artistic creators. Both of their engagements in self-portraiture destabilize the spectator’s objectifying gaze by negotiating and mediating their controlled self-representation with the objectification they face by the gendered dynamic of looking.

Marisol and Chadwick’s choice of mediums produce a difference in self-representation that lends their likenesses to varying degrees of subjection. Marisol’s Dinner Date combines traditional sculptural materials such as wood and plaster with painterly materials like paint, canvas, and graphite, in conjunction with non-art objects such as leather boots and a metal fork. This combination reiterates the materiality of each medium and conflates the work’s identity between sculpture, painting, and object. The difference in the production of the two figures furthers this tension, since the left figure’s face is naturalistically carved into the wood while the one on the right is simply painted on an undifferentiated wooden bloc, providing a contrast between two and three dimensionality. Materiality is also reiterated in the visible pencil strokes and the thin paint application that transparently hover over the still visible wood grain.

The final iteration of Vanity is a photograph, but it reflects The Oval Court that was part of a larger instillation titled Of Mutability. The Oval Court is comprised of twelve

images of the artist’s nude body adhered to the ground, produced by photocopying her entire body along with dead animals, flowers, and other materials added to the glass plate, all printed with blue toner. The flat images are displayed with five gold orbs in a room with walls decorated

by Rococo style paper columns with images of Chadwick’s face making a variety of expressions above. The last part of the instillation is a mirror that features weeping eyes engraved into the glass and allows the viewer to configure their own form of self-representation alongside Chadwick’s. Vanity clearly draws reference to this aspect of the instillation. The photographic print, both produced by the camera and the photocopy machine, adheres to a traditional paradigm of looking. The artist’s body is perceived through these outside apparatuses, subjugating her within the frame of the mechanical gaze, with heightened stakes because of her nudity. Chadwick engages with the dynamic of engendered looking through her use of photography to capture her nude body, more so than Marisol does through her stiff usage of wood. Marisol rejects objectification and the sense of surveillance that Chadwick allows for in her compartmentalized, boxed figures that share no likeness to her own body. Even if one were to voyeuristically crouch down beneath the level of the table to see up her figures’ dresses, the spectator would only be left with the disappointing reminder of their wooden materiality.

Beyond the realm of their mediums, Dinner Date and Vanity destabilize and challenge the gaze by fashioning their figures as subjects in the act of looking. In “Visual Pleasures and Narrative Cinema (1975),” Laura Mulvey constructs a paradigm for analyzing Hollywood cinema in which the male figure inherently controls the gaze, establishing a continued objectification of the female characters in film. The museum or gallery spectator as possessor of the gaze functions very differently than the systematic male gaze in Hollywood cinema, but Mulvey’s argument for recognizing women as the receiver of the look in image culture more generally can be applied to Marisol and Chadwick’s works. For example, Mulvey writes in the section “Woman as image, man as bearer of the look,” how, “In

NAR | 13

their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness.” Through self-portraiture, this quality that the imaged female exudes is applies to the artists themselves. However, through the authority of self-representation, they succeed in destabilizing the intensity of Mulvey’s claim in their self-reflexive ability to control their own gazes through conscious angling.

In Dinner Date, the leftmost figure has a carved face while the rightmost one has three painted/drawn faces, which include her front and both sides of her profile. The repetition of Marisol’s face angles her gaze so that when walking around the work, it is impossible to come to a point where her look is not physically present. At the same time, her expression is blasé and she appears to be looking directly through rather than at the spectator. This effect exists internally in the work as well, since the two figures do not make eye contact with each other, reiterating their indifference to the outside viewer. Although the angling of Marisol’s omnipresent gaze reasserts her as the subject of the look, her detached and weak expression does not lend itself to the status of complete control. The physical properties of Dinner Date also bound the women into the realm of objectivity. Their bodies are physically transformed into objects, since the wood of their bodies is fused into the chair itself. Although the distinction between the premade chair and Marisol’s sculpturally treated wood is apparent, the chair has no back or seat, forcing the women to literally become the chair they are placed on.

Chadwick engages with the angling of her own gaze through the reflection of the mirror. Although she is turned away from the camera, her look is rendered visible through her reflection. Like Marisol’s glazed eyes and indifferent demeanor, the angle of Chadwick’s reflection still diverges from committing to direct contact with the viewer.

It is inconclusive if the ultimate target of her gaze is her own reflection, or if the mirror serves as a mode for looking at her artwork that must be in front of her. While the mirror may control the angle of her gaze, Chadwick decides the presentation of her own nude body, since she consciously chooses to play with how her self-fashioning engages with the male gaze. In the article “A Red Mirror,” Mark Sladen focuses on how Chadwick uses a variety of “conceptual frameworks” to challenge the societally constructed notion of the self. Specifically in terms of her self-fashioning, he describes how “Chadwick also understood the power of spectacle…Chadwick attempted—and often succeeded—in turning the spectacle of female nudity to her own subversive ends.” The dramatic feather on her lap and the curtain draped behind her set her up as a willing performer in the spectacle. The sense of performativity is emphasized in the physical space she occupies, her own exhibition, since she deliberately displayed her body as a work of art located in

NAR | 14

a gallery instillation. The mediation between control and submission to the spectacle is reiterated in the reflective qualities of the mirror. While her reflection may challenge the viewer’s gaze, it also repeats the image of her nude torso, offering the viewer a second angle with which to visualize her physicality. Both Marisol and Chadwick’s looks do not have the aggressive capabilities to outright refute the engendered gaze since they unquestionably put themselves on display, yet the angle of their address does destabilize the power of the omniscient male gaze that Mulvey defines.

Marisol and Chadwick’s self-presentation as artistic creators is another means of directly challenging their positions as passive receptors. Chadwick’s self-portrait in front of her work draws on the historical tradition of artists imaging themselves as creators, choosing to depict themselves in the act of producing art or besides their finished works.

By projecting her body onto the reflection of The Oval Court, Chadwick reiterates her authority over the power of its creation. The role of the mirror also has the effect of furthering the trope of art as a reflection of the artist’s inner self. The symbolism of the mirror and its connotation for revealing the invisible interiority of the artist also takes historicized roots in the binarization between mind and body. This dichotomy is explored in Vanity, since the mirror integrates Chadwick’s physical body within the spiritual atmosphere of The Oval Court, a work that also juxtaposes the female body and a sacred space. Marina Warner, quoted in “The Red Mirror,” describes Chadwick’s role in The Oval Court as “the one who leaps and gluts and feels and gorges and makes herself over to pleasure in a deliberately provocative display of the female nude.” Self-presentation in Vanity serves a similar function by reveling the body in the mode of self-fulfillment and enjoyment, rather than as a selfless or naïve offering to the viewer. While Chadwick’s self-portraiture relies on historic tradition, it collapses it as well by combining the genre of self-portraiture with the traditional subject of the female nude. By placing the nude figure in the position of the creator, Chadwick negotiating her agency in the image, challenging the paradigm that places subject and object as diametrically opposed.

Marisol also positions herself as creator through the inclusion of plaster casts of her hands. The mythical identity of the artists’ hands as the site of creation is literally imprinted into Dinner Date. However, the one uncovered foot that includes a cast of Marisol’s toes mocks the authority of her hands. Marisol also only casts her left hand, in four different positions. This decision creates an unresolvable tension: perhaps Marisol is left-handed and includes the hand that directly represented artistic production, or perhaps she simply created the work without assistance and needed her stronger hand to produce the cast on her opposite one. Although it is impossible to offer a definitive response, the four left hands reiterate her liminal position as both the artist in the position of authority and the object of

the viewer’s speculation. The detached hand located on the table holding the real fork also draws a parallel between her hands and the detached expression of her face. While these forms of self-representation speak to her role as an artist, they also engage with popular culture’s role of mystifying and commodifying figures in the spotlight. As a part of the Pop Art movement, her engagement with mass media culture is expressed in the depersonalization of the dinner table environment, the bland and literally flat TV dinners, and the amputated hand which functions independently of the rest of the figure’s body. By using her own face and hands to question the power of American consumerism, Marisol is framing herself within such a cultural context and calling to question how her personal engagement with this phenomenon affects the mediation of her figure’s gaze.

Marisol’s engagement with mass media during the 1960s extended into her personal life as well. In the chapter “Figuring Marisol’s Femininities” in A Taste for Pop: Pop Art, Gender, and Consumer Culture, Cécile Whiting describes how Marisol was often pictures in women’s magazines, stylized in trendy outfits and featured in the fashion section rather than being taken seriously as an artist. In these spreads, her works were treated as props or backdrops, cute trinkets to reiterate her fashionable dress and pretty face. This is expressed when Whiting writes how, “Harper’s Bazaar treated Marisol’s status as an artist as just one more feminine role requiring one more fashionable costume.” The media’s treatment of Marisol de-emphasized the formalist qualities of her works by focusing on her “primitive” and exotic aesthetic, which conflated her personal biography with her artistic productions. The illegibility in Marisol’s sculpture’s gaze such as in Dinner Date became viewed as an aspect of her enigmatic persona. However, while other Pop Artists such as Andy Warhol carefully orchestrated their artistic personas as a necessary part of their popular success, as a female artist before the rise of the feminist art movement, the media’s influence placed Marisol in a vulnerable position that compromised the authority of her sculptural figures to fight against the subjugation of the gaze, a form of subjugation that she was often pressured to succumb to in her real life.

Critical responses to Marisol and Chadwick’s works during their time periods challenged their authority over the perception of their self-portraits. In Dinner Date, Marisol chooses to go on a date with herself and in Vanity, the title implicates Chadwick’s self-awareness over the vain act of regarding one’s own reflection. While these artists derive from two different eras, before and after the rise of the second-wave feminist movement and subsequent feminist art movement, despite a world of shifting expectations they received eerily similar treatments. Both artists were criticized as narcissistic because of their self-figuration, requiring them to defend their artistic choices. Chadwick was especially criticized for providing her body to the male gaze in Vanity and as Mark Sladen describes, Chadwick’s

nude body left “contemporary commentators…divided as to whether the female body was being cast in a traditional ornamental role, or whether ornament itself was being recast to reveal previously hidden meanings.” For Marisol, these claims had the effect of boxing her into the category of the feminine, which Whiting describes as how, “Marisol’s enigma and her narcissism served to situate her within the category of the feminine rather than within that of the modern artist… where enigma suggested an unfathomable interiority, narcissism implied a visible exteriority where everything was reflected on the surface.” These types of criticism threaten the sense of controlled authority these women had in their mediation of the politics of the self within their particular works.

The negotiation between control and objectification by the look addresses the notion of an undoing of binary oppositions. In the article “Helen Chadwick, the ‘shorelines of culture’ and the transvaluation of the life sciences,” Aris Sarifianos provides an overview of Chadwick’s projects, focusing on how she mediates between seemingly opposed phenomena that “sets up and ‘irritates’ a plethora of standard contrasts.” Both Chadwick and Marisol play on the binary between subject and object through their mediating gaze. One of objectives of the two artists in producing binary oppositions was to fundamentally undermine them, and both artists strive to produce self-portraiture that allows for the paradoxical engagement in both sides of the politics of the gaze.

While Marisol’s Dinner Date and Helen Chadwick’s Vanity exemplify self-portraiture in which the artists are able to choose their self-representations, as female figures in an image culture that perpetuates the engendered looked, they are only able to gain partial control over their “to-be-looked-at-ness.” Their self-fashioning as creators and use of mediums stress levels of their authority over the objectification of the male gaze, mediating their representations between subject and object. Through an engagement of alternative forms of self-portraiture, the negotiation of the self becomes the negotiation of the politics of the look.

WORKS CITED Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasures and Narrative Cinema.” In Visual and Other Pleasures. New York: Palgrave Macmilian, 1989.

Sarafianos, Aris. “Helen Chadwick, the ‘shorelines of culture’ and the transvaluation of the life sciences.” For Helen Chadwick: A Retrospective, Manchester Art Gallery, Manchester, 24 September 2004-21 November 2004. 2005.

Sladen, Mark. “A Red Mirror.” In Helen Chadwick. Edited by Mark Sladen. London: Barbican Art Gallery, 2004.

Whiting, Cécile. “Figuring Marisol’s Femininities.” In A Taste for Pop: Pop Art, Gender, and Consumer Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

NAR | 15

THE MANIPULATION OF THE FEMALE NUDE bradley smith | northwestern ‘18 In Every Playboy Centerfold, The Decades (normalized),

Jason Salavon presents four amalgamated portraits displaying the relative changes and consistencies in Playboy centerfolds across four decades. Salavon’s aggregative procedure behind the making of this work ultimately functions in two primary ways: on top of creating an aesthetically-pleasing print, this procedure also highlights Playboy’s varying visual treatment of its female models across forty years. In particular, through his paradoxical contrast between concealment and exposure, Salavon lends his aggregated female figures dual natures resembling both mythological and religious icons. Furthermore, by representing these figures through a digital medium, Salavon ultimately reveals the perpetual manipulation of the female nude found not only in the production of these centerfolds, but also in much of Western art history as a whole.

One of the key features defining Every Playboy Centerfold is Salavon’s complex visual play between concealment and exposure. By amalgamating hundreds of centerfolds into these four portraits, Salavon blurs each figure nearly beyond recognition, obscuring any limbs, facial features, and other bodily details. Consequently, by stripping the models of these fundamental physical characteristics, Salavon dehumanizes the figures and lends them a nearly monstrous quality. This is particularly evident in the 60s and 70s portraits. Here, by shrouding the exact placement of hair on each models’ head, Salavon almost gives each figure the impression of bearing a glowing mane.

Furthermore, by obscuring each model’s face, Salavon also abstracts and fragments the placement of each model’s eyes. From a distance, the figures appear completely void of having eyes or other facial features of the like; yet, upon closer examination, one can see multiple very faint curves and sketches of eyes within and surrounding each model’s head. With this, Salavon almost lends each piece a Cubist impression when viewed up close by fragmenting and reorganizing the models’ facial features into a new whole; yet, because these details are so faint, the models still hold a certain level of anonymity. Nevertheless, by obscuring each model’s face and morphing their human characteristic, Salavon nearly dehumanizes each figure while jointly

NAR | 16

lending them a nearly beastly quality. Here, of course, it’s important to recognize Salavon’s role in the making of each work: although Salavon himself may not have initially intended to produce many of these intricate effects characterizing each piece, it’s important to note that he nevertheless chose to retain and exhibit each of these portraits based on these features. Thus, although much of the intended “work” may be exhausted by Salavon’s amalgamating code, Salavon’s jurisdiction in selecting which pieces ultimately prove interesting or provocative nevertheless lend him artistic authority over these works and their individual nuances.

Nonetheless, as a result of these almost animalistic attributes, each model—and particularly those in the 80s and 90s portraits—evokes impressions almost resembling those of mythological creatures, like the Minotaur or Medusa given Salavon’s abstraction of the models’ hair, eyes, and legs. Given the utter exposure of the models’ bodies, however, and their original intent to be displayed as a nude, these figures ultimately most closely resemble mythological nymphs—and particularly those represented by Pre-Raphaelite painters. One case in which this appears particularly pertinent occurs in the comparison of Salavon’s Centerfolds to John William Waterhouse’s Hylas and the Nymphs. First off, both pieces lend each female figure a highly ethereal quality. Given the sheen and almost glistening mixture of pastel colors in the busts of the 80s and 90s portraits, the models appear to have a magical and nearly enchanting quality, similar to that of the nymphs in Waterhouse’s painting. Furthermore, by presenting these figures as fundamentally exposed and vulnerable in their nudity, Salavon also lends the models and air of seduction—inviting the viewer to behold in their physical beauty, yet also preventing the viewer from being completely satisfied through his abstraction and amalgamated concealment of their physical details.

As a result of this, each model—especially when displayed together as a group—is reminiscent of sirens or seductive nymphs: ultimately luring the viewer in yet retaining a sense of mystique or removal due to each portrait’s fundamental abstraction.

Despite the evident air of allure presented by both these mythical parallels and the images’ original intentions,

JASON SALAVON, EVERY PLAYBOY CENTERFOLD, THE DECADES(NORMALIZED)

NAR | 17

however, Centerfolds also evokes an element of holiness, echoing much of Western art’s classical depictions of religious icons. This is particularly evident the resemblance of the 80s and 90s portraits to many Renaissance and Baroque representations of the Virgin Mary. One of the most evocative features supporting this comparison is the portraits’ blue backgrounds. Essentially, the juxtaposition of these rich blue backdrops with the pale models’ skin loosely resembles the blue robes with which Madonna is consistently depicted wearing in artworks dating back to the medieval or even Byzantine eras. Furthermore, the two-dimensional, front-facing position of the 80s and 90s models also carry similarities to many Renaissance and Baroque representation of the Virgin Mary. For example, compared to Guido Reni’s Assumption of the Virgin (1580), alongside their corresponding positions and lifelike size, Salavon’s figures share in a similar yet contrasting sense of exposure. Just as Mary presents herself to be taken in heaven, vulnerable to the hands of God, the models stand completely vulnerable to the eyes of the viewer. Granted, nude depictions of the Virgin Mary are extremely uncommon or unheard of in classical art; yet nevertheless, the ethereal and almost holy quality of these figures—additionally, note their abstract halo of golden hair—ultimately draws many similarities between these works and classical depictions of religious icons. Essentially, just as one may view these pieces in a gallery or digital setting, one could easily imagine them hanging above an altar or within a stained glass window, blurring the boundary between the revealed and the revelation—between these once Playboy models and more formal religious icons.

Through his subtle evocation of monstrous, mythical, and religious figures, Salavon ultimately grants these female models contrasting impressions of the ethereal, the seductive, and the dangerous. On one hand, these religious undertones induce an air of reverence and innocence; yet, on another, Salavon’s near-dehumanization and abstraction of the women also suggest an element of seduction and mystery. Thus, Salavon takes the compositions’ play between abstraction, concealment, and exposure to create an ultimately ambiguous woman. Essentially, by aggregating these images and creating a hybrid of female nudes, Salavon also creates a hybrid of female archetypes—it becomes unclear whether these female figures are indeed religious deities, mythical creatures, damsels in distress, femme fatales, or simply the Playboy models composing these portraits. As a result, Salavon creates an aesthetically pleasing yet fundamentally ambiguous female nude, highlighting and recalling characteristics from various female tropes within the art historical and literary canon. Thus, due to these abstracted characteristics, one essentially begins to question whether these nudes represent, for example, The Birth of Venus, one of Cezanne’s Bathers, or even the tragic Lady of Shalott, thereby marking Salavon’s work as a series of idyllic yet ambiguous female portraits.

NAR | 18

This notion of creating the idyllic female nude is particularly interesting when put in the context of the piece’s digital medium. Specifically, with this digital process in mind, these works reveal the sheer amount of manipulation of the female nude present not only in Playboy magazines, but also within Western art’s larger visual culture as a whole. One of the most obvious features characterizing the four portraits as a unit is the noticeable shift in preferences, editing, and general taste across these four decades. Between the 70s and the 80s, for example, there is an evident change in background color, a strikingly blonder model, and overall more exposure found around the model’s bust. Granted, many of these differences may largely be a result of technological advances in photography and editing; yet, nevertheless, many of these variances may also be a product of Playboy’s—and many of its customers’—shifting preferences regarding the ideal female nude portrait, or more generally, the ideal female body. This is manifested not only in Playboy’s positioning of the models, as revealed through Salavon’s amalgamations, but also through their choice of models to begin with, their editing of the photo and/or certain body parts, and so on in order to create the ideal female nude. As a result, Centerfolds explicitly displays this overarching shift in Playboy’s preferred female nude. Likewise, if one were to take the views of Playboy as that of its consumer base—largely heterosexual men in America and some of the (mostly) Western world—then Centerfolds as a series may also signify not only the changes in Playboy’s preferences, but also the changes in those of the larger society as a whole.

Furthermore, the digital process underlying the creation of this piece also accentuates the manipulation of the female image within both the digital and physical worlds.

To begin, the sourcing and compiling of these portraits is utterly mechanical. In order to create these amalgamations, Salavon developed a computer program to digitally overlay hundreds of centerfold images from each of the four decades, subsequently taking the organic female body and subjecting it to a strict process of mechanization. Yet, in the end, the work is a largely tactile piece. The layering of texts and textures found in each centerfold ultimately gives each portrait a silky yet also scratchy quality mimicking the nature of a textile or fabric. Even when viewed on a computer screen as opposed to a physical print, the work nevertheless achieves a tactile, handmade characteristic despite its digital medium. This is particularly significant given Centerfolds’ humane, largely physical subject. Essentially, the computer’s ability to create such a seemingly tactile object representing the fleshy, corporal subject that is the female body ultimately sparks questions on Salavon’s, the computer’s, and Playboy’s ability to manipulate and create the ideal female figure, or at least the image of one.

This notion proves particularly significant in the broader context of the objectification of women also addressed in this piece. As he does in his other amalgamated

works, here, Salavon treats the human body as a raw piece of data. These data in particular can be easily downloaded, edited, shared, and so forth at will—as Salavon himself did in the creation of this work; yet, the copying and digital handling of these data, particularly when they are images of a naked female body, ultimately highlight the exploitation of both the image and the body depicted, as discussed in Wendy Hui Kyong Chun and Sarah Friedland’s “Habits of Leaking” (Chun and Friedland). Granted, one may argue that the visual depiction and subsequent viewing of any subject leads that subject to be in a sense objectified; yet, the digital nature of this work, combined with its focus on Playboy’s centerfold-piece practices ultimately promote questions regarding the digital- and real-world objectification of the female nude.

By evoking the various classical, religious, and mythological motifs detailed earlier in this essay, Salavon extends this notion of the manipulation of the female nude beyond the context of Playboy magazine and the digital platform, and onto the larger history of Western visual culture. Essentially, by evoking these archetypal themes, Salavon questions the true nature of the idealized female nude.

Although each of these four portraits display significant differences of what may been seen as the ideal female body in each decade, their overarching resemblances to ancient and classical art historical forms nevertheless suggest that this idyllic female figure has remained relatively consistent over the course of history. Thus, when displayed together, the four portraits suggest a dual sense of shifting and yet constant preferences towards the ideal female figure. As a result, one may ultimately begin to think about the editing and manipulation of the female body not only by Playboy and in other contemporary practices, but throughout history—extending into the artistic portrayals of women in Medieval, Romantic, or Renaissance art. Thus, in Every Playboy Centerfold, Salavon critiques the manipulation of the female nude not only within Playboy’s 20th-century issues, but within the larger historical context of Western visual culture.

RENI, GUIDO. ASSUMPTION OF THE VIRGIN.

WORKS CITED Chun, Wendy Hui Kyong, and Sarah Friedland. “Habits of Leaking: Of

Sluts and Network Cards.” Duke University Press 26.2 (2015):

1-22. Print.

Reni, Guido. Assumption of the Virgin. Digital image. WikiArt.com.

WikiArt, n.d. Web. 6 Dec. 2016.

Salavon, Jason. Every Playboy Centerfold, The Decades (normalized).

Digital image. Jasonsalavon.com. N.p., n.d. Web. 5 Dec. 2016.

Waterhouse, John William. Hylas and the Nymphs. Digital image. Art

UK. Manchester Art Gallery, n.d. Web. 5 Dec. 2016.

NAR | 19

Women and Flowers in Ladies Wearing Flowered Headdresses & Tang Poetry elissa schmiel | wellesley ‘19

F

ollowing the brief Sui Dynasty, the vibrant Tang Dynasty ushered in an era of cosmopolitan living and exponential economic growth that allowed for art to thrive.

The capital of Chang’an bustled with merchants, envoys, and poets. There, people of the Tang could purchase goods from places such as Korea, Japan, the South Pacific, India, and Persia. With increased trade, a greater array of products entered the Tang market, including varying colors of dyes, Kashmir textiles, and rouge for ladies’ faces comprised of foreign color-rich materials.

During this time of globalization and innovation in the Tang, the arts flourished immaculately. Tang court painting produced images of beautiful women, strong horses, and luscious gardens. Active during the Tang Dynasty, artist Zhou Fang was renowned for his illustrations of elegant courtesans at leisure in palatial pleasure gardens.

In his Ladies Wearing Flowered Headdresses, dating from the 8th-Century C.E., Zhou Fang represents an archetypal Tang court scene, portraying women as charming beings with graceful mannerisms. The flowers, magnificent at the time of illustration, decorate the ladies’ fans and parallel the perishable beauty of their delicate holders. In the same fashion, Tang poetry engaged floral imagery and compared women to the once-striking flowers that eventually fade with time.

A fascination with poetry swept the dynasty, with poets such as Li Bai achieving great fame. Poetry became a widespread pastime deeply rooted in Tang culture, and poets composed fluid lines on nature, friendship, and exquisite women. The portrayal of women in poetry and stories of the Tang often describe them as alluring and seductive, at times to the detriment of principal male characters. Figures of speech, such as similes and metaphors, compare women to objects in nature that have pleasant scents and delicate features. Flowers, for example, are commonly associated with women and their elegant fragility. As is evidenced in both Ladies Wearing Flowered Headdresses and Tang poetry, women – particularly courtesans – in the Tang were

NAR | 20

considered perishable objects for the visual and sensual pleasure of heterosexual men through interaction with the senses.

THE PLEASURE GARDEN

The pleasure gardens of the Tang Dynasty served as spaces for individuals in which they could immerse themselves in nature. Enthusiasts put emphasis not merely on owning gardens, but asserted that one must understand the garden’s aesthetic in order to truly stand as the space’s owner.1 Men used pleasure gardens as areas for reflection, and the Tang considered the urban pleasure garden as a would-be hermit’s space for contemplation.2 In this way, gardens were an escape from the world to ponder and critique society. In the gardens of the Tang, the rural and urban, the spiritual and material, and social obligation and independence intermingled.3 For men, the exam system practiced in the Tang attested to how thinking was considered a noble action, and gardens were a space for such a practice.

For courtesans, however, the pleasure gardens served another purpose. While Tang society encouraged men to study intensively and ascend to roles of great scholars and officials to bring honor to their families, women were expected to assume subservient positions. As a result, pleasure gardens were not areas of intellectual reflection for women, but aesthetically pleasing settings for leisure where they could enjoy nature and pass time waiting to be summoned by their male lovers. Concurrently, the male gaze is ever-present in illustrations of women in pleasure gardens.

Zhou Fang’s painting, Ladies Wearing Flowered Headdresses, is imagined from a male perspective. The emperor’s exquisite courtesans are painted in a setting that is implied to be equally as mesmerizing. Zhou Fang’s illustration of two amusements, women and gardens, categorizes this scene as one that is suited for the heterosexual male viewer. The beauty of the gardens reflects that of the courtesans, and vice versa. Because Zhou omits a detailed background and instead opts for a handful of adornments

Zhou Fang, Ladies wearing flowered headdresses.

NAR | 21

and symbols that convey a place of beauty, this is a scene not of intellectual reflection, but of superficiality and eroticism. Zhou creates a scene of desirable objects in a place of implied equal beauty; therefore, the subject of the painting is no longer owning a garden through feeling of its aesthetics, but feeling through owned objects as depicted in the garden.

WOMEN IN ZHOU FANG

While Zhou Fang painted large religious murals, he is best known for his depictions of the emperor’s preferred court ladies, each with a specific position in the imperial order. In Zhou’s scroll, importance of rank is communicated through his engagement of hierarchy of scale. Incidentally, one may infer that the larger four women are of higher rank and greater importance to the emperor, while the smaller two figures that alternate between the larger figures are less esteemed. The smaller figure holding the fan is a maid to the concubines, as is conveyed through her size and less intricate hairstyle. This depiction of imperial concubines reflects the Confucian value of social hierarchy.

Zhou Fang also uses dress to further denote wealth and position. The courtesans are dressed and styled magnificently, and their Persian hairstyles are done meticulously.

Their skin is flawless and delicate, and their eyebrows are shaped in the stylish moth silhouette. Rouge gives youthful color to their cheeks, and plump, cherry mouths are painted onto the courtesans’ lips to further enhance their beauty.

While Zhou Fang painted portraits of male officials with the goal of evoking their inner personalities through their features, this is not so in this scroll.4 Each concubine has the same facial structure, further intensifying the ladies’ eroticism.5 Their silk robes and shawls are similar, as well, in the manner in which they drape across (and cling to) their bodies. So transparent are the textiles that patterned undergarments reveal themselves beneath them, further contributing to the sensuality of the painting. The intricate patterns weaved into their textiles radiate extravagance only a wealthy man could expend on multiple concubines.

The suggestiveness of the fabric transforms the scene from a private moment of leisure and superficial appreciation of nature, to an erotic moment of gazing upon charming women in a private setting.

Zhou Fang’s scroll painting is a scene of imperial women in an imperial setting, meant primarily for imperial enjoyment. It is the exclusivity of Zhou’s scene which makes it that much more erotic. The courtesans spend their lives waiting to be called to the emperor, and interact with the little animals as an act of shared loneliness.6 Like the pugs, the women are objects of entertainment being observed in the imperial gardens.7 In Zhou’s painting, the butterfly may symbolize the emperor and his desires, and the person on whom the butterfly lands would be chosen to

NAR | 22

attend to the ruler. In this interpretation, the courtesan at the left of the painting would be read as the first concubine, for she holds the butterfly and is therefore personally selected by the emperor. Because the court ladies may be called upon at any time, they are continuously beautifying themselves for the moment at which he may request them. The blooming magnolias at the left of Zhou’s painting set the scene in the springtime, when romances begin to blossom.

Over time, these enchantments, like the magnolia blossoms, being to age and wither.

Another element of beauty employed throughout Zhou Fang’s painting is the flower. The woman in the middle of the composition holds a small red cut flower. This severed flower implies that the woman and flower are now pretty and fragrant, but their beauty will eventually whither away come autumn. Floral patterns decorate the women’s clothing, further associating the court ladies with symbols of a delicate, perishable nature. Flowers are also incorporated into their hairstyles. Zhou Fang laboriously paints elaborate floral hairpieces that were common among fine ladies of the Tang, though the grand size of those illustrated would have been unusual for everyday use. As a result, one may surmise that the ladies are celebrating the “Birthday of the Flowers,” which serves as an additional explanation for the proliferation of floral elements.8 The servant girl holds a fan that bears an image of a peony. In celebration of the festival, the courtesans attempt to attract butterflies to observe and admire; the peony on the fan works to entice the insects.9 Just as the sweet scent of the flowers seduces butterflies to flock to the scene, and just as the ladies regard the butterflies as objects for them to admire for their beauty, so the elegance of the courtesans lure the viewer to the scene and tempt the onlooker to consider the women as objects for their visual enjoyment.

WOMEN AND FLOWERS IN TANG POETRY

As in Zhou Fang’s scroll, Tang poetry frequently made parallels between women and flowers to express charming feminine qualities. Poetry included imagery of flowers such as magnolias, orchids, chrysanthemums, and peonies. The peony was also known in Tang poetry as a “celestial fragrance,” which served as a metaphor for beautiful women.10 Poets often employed natural images to complement women. As were flowers, courtesans were planted into households to serve as objects for the appreciation of men. Tang poetry reflects this objectification illustrated in Zhou Fang. Drinking with Friends Amongst the Blooming Peonies, by Ling Huchu, is one such poem in which floral imagery is employed. The poem reads: We had a drinking party to admire the peonies.

I drank cup after cup till I was drunk.

Then to my shame I heard the flowers whisper, “What are we doing, blooming for these old alcoholics?”11

Although Ling does not mention women directly, the peonies symbolize exquisite ladies. The scene is set in a pleasure garden where older men sit drinking and talking amongst themselves. The men marvel at the peonies and treat them as means of entertainment, just as the women in Ladies Wearing Flowered Headdresses are admired. In addition, Ling includes that the narrator hears the “flowers” mumble quietly. The act of whispering suggests an inability to speak, and the ladies’ words express their recognition of objectification and grief because of their roles as tokens of desirability. The female obsession with beauty is also portrayed in Tang poetry, as in painting. This fixation was rooted in the craving to be desired by men, a result of a courtesan’s hierarchical position as dependent upon her charm and appeal. Du Xunhe’s A Spring Grievance in the Palace conveys the pressure concubines felt to maintain their looks: When I was young my loveliness led me astray.

Now by my mirror I am weary of powder and paint.

My looks no longer enjoy His Majesty’s favour And that makes me ask why I make up at all.

The birds all twitter away in the warm breeze; When the sun is high the flowers cast heavy shadows.

Year after year the women by the stream in Yue Think of me as they pick the lotus flowers.12

In Du’s poem, the woman narrating was once a desired courtesan of the emperor, but has since aged and lost her attractive physical qualities. While she recognizes her descent from a respected position, the woman continues to make up her face with powder, clinging to the hope that she will be summoned. The narrator, like the concubines in Zhou Fang, is consumed with making herself beautiful. The lotuses the women pick by the stream, symbolizing innocence and purity, refer to the narrator’s naiveté in thinking that she would always retain the emperor’s favor.

In Tang poetry, as in Tang court painting, parallels between flowers and ladies were drawn in abundance. By using flowers as symbols, poets created aesthetically pleasing language to convey their messages. The integration of pleasure gardens, exquisite women, floral symbolism, and the heterosexual male gaze culminate in conceiving the role of a concubine as an object to be appreciated for its physical attractiveness and grace.

CONCLUDING THOUGHTS

The Tang Dynasty was a time of cosmopolitan living, tremendous economic growth, trade, and engagement with the arts. During this period, artists produced court paintings of powerful and sturdy horses, portraits of esteemed officials, and delicate courtesans in abundance.

Simultaneously, poetry assumed a significant role in Tang

society, in which the art form became a popular skill and pastime. In both high arts, the beautiful woman persists as a prevalent subject. Zhou Fang’s Ladies Wearing Flowered Headdresses portrays a scene of concubines at leisure in an imperial pleasure garden. Immaculately and erotically made up, the ladies function as subjects of the heterosexual male viewer’s delight. Their beauty, echoed by that of the flowers, is not immortal, but recedes over time. Just as flowers begin their lovely lives in the spring and perish in the autumn, in the Tang, women lose their sensual luster as they age. The crane in Zhou’s scroll ironically symbolizes longevity, either functioning as a juxtaposition of opposites or representing the courtesans’ desires to stay charming forever in hopes to sustain their positions in the imperial hierarchy. As is palpable in the depictions of women and their relations to delicate and perishable flowers in Tang court painting and poetry, the value of courtesans, such as those in Zhou Fang’s Ladies Wearing Flowered Headdresses, was dependent upon their appearances. In the Tang Dynasty, flowers and concubines, celebrated during their short time of beauty, both existed as charming objects for the pleasurable observation of the heterosexual male viewer.

FOOTNOTES ----Yang, Xiaoshan. “Intro.” In Metamorphosis of the Private Sphere: Gardens and Objects in Tang-Song Poetry, 3. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003.

2 Ibid.

3 Ibid., 3-4.

4 Karetzky, Patricia Eichenbaum. “Emperor Dezong.” In Court Art of the Tang, 121. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1996.

5 Hung, Wu. “The Origins of Chinese Painting.” In Three Thousand Years of Chinese Painting, 77-78. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997.

6 Ibid.

7 Ibid.

8 Laing, Ellen Johnston. “Chinese Palace-Style Poetry and the Depiction of a Palace Beauty.” The Art Bulletin 72, no. 2 (June 1990): 284. https://www.jstor. org/stable/pdf/3045734.pdf.

9 Ibid., 286.

10 Chen, Peter Min-Liang, and Michael Tan. “Poem as Epilogue For Ms. Zhang Ren Shi’s Peony Album.” In A Scholar’s Path: An Anthology of Classical Chinese Poems and Prose of Chen Qing Shan : A Pioneer Writer of Malayan-Singapore Literature, 323. Singapore: World Scientific Publishing Company, Incorporated, 2010.

11 Liunang, Ting, Emperor Yang, and Ling Huchu. “Peonies in Classical Chine Poetry.” Cricket Hill Garden. January 7, 2012. Accessed December 28, 2016.

12 Harris, Peter, trans. “Zhu Qingyu.” In Three Hundred Tang Poems, 88. New York, NY: Random House, Inc., 2009.

1

NAR | 23

LEONARDO DA VINCI, STUDIES FOR THE HEAD OF LEDA.

NAR | 24

LEONARDO’S LEDA: AN EXPERIENCE OF ART’S TRANSCENDENCE natalie edwards | wash u. ‘18 Despite having produced thousands of pages of notes

and drawings over the course of his sixty-seven years, Leonardo da Vinci produced shockingly few finished works of art. The pages of his notebooks reveal a mind that was restless, constantly inquiring into the nature of things.

While his painting provided income, Leonardo understood himself, first and foremost, as a scientist: an anatomist, a mathematician, and an engineer. Through art, he engaged with the world by direct observation and satisfied his curiosity in a way that engineering and anatomical studies could not. To Leonardo, painting, through its imitation of nature, connected the world to its creator.

Many of his most beautiful drawings of nature were truly scientific studies, accompanied by paragraphs of observations on the behavior of water or the formation of mountains.

And yet, Leonardo’s mind was not merely scientific, it was also curious, imaginative and whimsical. In one particular sheet, Leonardo sketches a cat in various positions and, as the sheet progresses, the cat transforms into a dragon-like creature. He constantly lept from one subject to another. His allegorical drawings were some of his most whimsical. A lover of animals, his allegories often featured creatures such as his Allegory of the Fidelity of the Lizard, his Allegory of the Mirror and the Fighting Animals, and his Allegory with Wolf and Eagle.

Mythological subjects also interested Leonardo, as evidenced by the Louvre Bacchus/St. John. And we know that he read Ovid. Given his active imagination, his interest in allegory, nature, animals, and the sources of life, it is not surprising that Leonardo would have been interested in the myth of Leda and the Swan.

According to Greek and Roman mythology, Zeus/ Jove spotted Leda, queen of Sparta and wife of King Tyndareus, bathing in a river and was immediately struck by her great beauty. In order to seduce her, Jove disguised himself as a swan and persuaded Venus to disguise herself as an eagle and to chase him along the river. Pretending

to be frightened, the swan sought protection and comfort in Leda’s arms and then made love to her. Subsequently, Leda gave birth to two pairs of human twins: Castor, Pollux, Helen, and Clytemnestra. In Ancient Greek literature, the story of Leda and the Swan was used to illustrate beauty, love or eroticism. While Leonardo likely read the story of Leda in Ovid, his Leda doesn’t fit with Ovid’s as his Leda is neither an illustration of passionate love nor is it a story of trickery.

Depictions of Leda and the Swan can be found in Greek works dating back to the fourth century B.C. In most of these ancient depictions, Leda is shown either sitting or standing, always in the act of copulation with Jove, the swan. During the middle ages, artists began to depict Leda differently: portraying Leda and the swan engaged in the act of conversation, rather than intercourse. Renaissance artists returned to a more classical depiction of the story, depicting Leda in both standing and reclining poses.

Leonardo was one of the first Renaissance artists to adopt the standing pose. Yet Leonardo’s Leda and Jove have no precedent in Ancient or Renaissance art; they embrace each other in a way that is neither passionate nor erotic but loving and tender.

Leonardo went beyond the classical, erotic depiction of Leda and Jove to portray the concept of love and creation itself. Sharing a loving embrace, Leda and the swan appear more like loving parents than lovers. Amidst an abundant array of plants and rocks, a nude Leda stands in an exaggerated, twisted contrapposto under the wing of a life-size swan. Her right arm and hand reach across her body to tenderly caresses the swan’s neck as she gazes down upon the four infants at her feet. By placing Leda within an abundant, fruitful landscape, Leonardo urges us to think of Leda not merely as the object of Jove’s love but as a maternal, generative figure. In Leonardo’s composition, the experience of creation and the bond between a mother and her children, between creator and created, becomes a transcendent, metaphysical experience of the interconnectedness of all creation that can only be fully realized on a grand scale, the scale of a Leonardo painting.

NAR | 25

Although no Leda exists today, I will argue that Leonardo did produce a finished Leda and the Swan and that this lost or destroyed painting was the culmination of Leonardo’s interests and observations, in nature and cosmology, in science, religion, mythology and art, and an inspired endeavor to perfect and surpass nature by creating a work of mythological art that is neither naturalistic not fantastical but rather transcendental.

It is difficult to propose a chronology for Leonardo’s interest in the subject of Leda and the Swan and his work on a painting of this subject, given that his drawings he made were not dated and cannot be connected with any existing painting of this subject. As with most of Leonardo’s work, we do not have a contract for a Leda and early biographers, such as Giorgio Vasari, make no mention of a Leda and the Swan composition. However, the existence of several preparatory Leda and the Swan pen, ink, and chalk studies, attributed to Leonardo, in the collections at Windsor, Rotterdam, and Chatsworth and the existence of several Leda and the Swan paintings that have been identified as copies of Leonardo’s now lost painting, strongly suggest that Leonardo created a painting of this subject.

Leonardo’s preoccupation with the figure of Leda likely originated around the time he was working on the Battle of Anghiari for the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence around 1503. This assumption is based on the existence of a sheet in the Windsor collection which includes a drawing of a horse that was most likely a preparatory drawing for the Battle of Anghiari.The three sketches of a kneeling Leda on this sheet are evidence of Leonardo’s earliest explorations of Leda. Interestingly, the sheet’s furthest left-hand drawing appears to have been superimposed upon a larger half drawing of two seated figures whose positions mirror those of the figures in the Virgin and Child with St. Anne.

It would not have been unusual for Leonardo to have been thinking of a religious and a mythological subject at the same time as he often thought of many things at once. Not only would the Virgin’s seated, bent over pose have been easily adaptable to a kneeling pose, but the two subject matters were also likely connected in his mind. The figures of his Virgin and Child with St. Anne are arranged in a pyramidal composition, each seated on top of another, seemingly growing out of each other. Perhaps Leonardo moved from thinking about the primary maternal figure in Christianity and the concept of genealogy to thinking about Leda, another mother, this time from pagan rather than Christian antiquity, whose children were also the product of a kind of miraculous conception.

The existence of two kneeling Leda drawings in the collections at Rotterdam and Chatsworth also help to date Leonardo’s occupation with the subject of a kneeling Leda near the time of his work on the Battle. The tall grasses that crowd the foreground of each of these sketches reveal what the marshy landscape of the lost Leda may have looked

NAR | 26

like. In the Rotterdam drawing, a cluster of tall, phallic cattail plants, with leaves like giant blades of grass, tower over her, alluding to the fecundity of Mother Nature and of Leda herself. Leonardo’s placement of a mythological subject in a natural landscape underscores his conception of creation as a unified, interconnected whole. Botanical studies such as a drawing of a cluster of Star of Bethlehem flowers, usually dated to the time of the kneeling Leda sketches, suggest Leonardo used botanical studies to make his Leda composition into a true moment of genesis.

While cartoons or paintings of a kneeling Leda survive, a painting of a half-kneeling Leda attributed to Giampietrino, now at Schloss Neuwid, is strikingly similar to Leonardo’s kneeling Ledas, especially those on the Anghiari sheet, suggesting that Leonardo may have brought his kneeling Leda at least to the stage of a cartoon. Leonardo’s lost painting was most likely not a kneeling but rather a standing Leda. This is the Leda that was copied and adapted the most during Leonardo’s time. The many exising copies suggest the Leda was received enthusiastically by fellow artists —as it was highly unusual for Renaissance artists to copy eachother’s work.

A standing Leda drawn by Raphael, likely executed when Raphael and Leonardo were both in Florence, around 1507, is one of the earliest surviving copies of Leonardo’s Leda. The creation of a cartoon of a standing Leda would explain Raphael’s Leda drawing and there is some evidence that a cartoon of a standing Leda existed. If Leonardo had already completed or even begun to work on a painting of a standing Leda during his time in Florence around 1506, it is surprising that we do not see more copies of the Leda by Florentine artists. Therefore, it is likely that Leonardo did not begin to paint Leda until his second Milanese period (c.1506-13).

There exist several Leda and the Swan paintings attributed to Milanese artists, one attributed to Cesare da Sesto, and another to to Francesco Melzi, datable to the first half of the sixteenth century which, because of the characteristics they share and their similarity to existing drawings of Leda by Leonardo, have come to be accepted as copies of a Leda by Leonardo. The existence of these copies suggests that Leonardo did paint a Leda and that it was greatly admired by those around him. The copies also make it easier to date Leonardo’s painting to his second Milanese period. We know little about Leonardo’s activities during this period (1506-13); although many scholars fill this gap with Leonardo’s designs for the Trivulzio monument, there is no indication that Leonardo carried his plans beyond the couple of drawings which remain from this project. Given this limited amount of information, it is possible that Leonardo would have had time to work on a Leda painting during this period.

The subject of Leda and the Swan would have intrigued Leonardo the scientist. According to Vasari, during

his first and second Milanese periods Leonardo devoted a significant amount of time to studying human anatomy.

His studies of the female reproductive system can be dated to this time. Perhaps Leonardo’s studies of the female body, the reproductive system, and embryology re-ignited an interest in creation that he once explored in his Mona Lisa. With the knowledge gained from his studies of anatomy coupled with the freedom of a noncommissioned work, painting a Leda would have allowed him to explore the mystery and achievement of creation further than he ever had before. Indeed in his Leda he uses the myth as a starting point for the development of a work that ultimately competes with the myth itself, going beyond illustration and narrative, using the natural world as a setting for a composition that transcends the natural world to deliver the concept and achievement of creation itself.

There was no greater influence on Leonardo’s Leda than the Mona Lisa. The complexity of this portrait makes it difficult to regard it as a ‘portrait’ in the traditional sense of the word. Here, the landscape dominates. The horizon lines, placed on either side of her eyes, pull some of the focus and power away from her mysterious gaze, linking her to the surrounding nature. Dirt paths worn into and between cavernous rocks weave their way through the desolate landscape. A bridge behind Lisa’s left shoulder suggests water below. It is this dynamic, mysterious landscape, along with the unusual portrayal of his sitter (fully frontal rather than in profile as was traditional for portraits at this time, in simple clothes rather than her nicest finery, and with her hair down and loose rather than tightly gathered), that make the Mona Lisa more a study of nature, of life, and of the mysteries of creation—the greatest of which was the mystery of conception and birth— than a portrait. The striking naturalism of Lisa’s features —her bright eyes, enigmatic smile, and olive skin, precisely modeled in light and shadow— gives life to the primordial landscape like a mother gives birth to a child, making Lisa more of an allegorical figure than the subject of a portrait.

The wild, raw Mona Lisa landscape explodes and quivers with life in the foreground of Leonardo’s Rotterdam and Chatsworth sketches for the Leda. Here, his female subject is not merely placed against a natural backdrop but in nature itself. The landscape is no longer a backdrop for presentation; it becomes a stage for action. In both cases, Leonardo uses his ostensible subject, a portrait of Lisa del Giocondo in the case of the Mona Lisa and the myth of Leda and the Swan in his Leda, as an Archimedean point from which he spirals off into new directions, developing and reinterpreting his subject. In the Mona Lisa, Leonardo urges his viewer to connect his subject, Lisa del Giocondo, with the primordial expression of Mother Nature behind her, prompting his viewer to contemplate the relation between a mother and Mother Nature, and even — with Mona Lisa’s enigmatic smile — between the human

and the divine. In the Leda, the connection between microcosm and macrocosm is more explicit: Leda comes from the water, the “veins of the earth,” and gives birth to four children who are the offspring of her and her husband, the King of Sparta, a ruler of the mortal world, and Jove, the King of the Gods.

He uses not a portrait but a mythological subject as his starting point for Leda, forcing his viewer into a fantastical realm, a shock made more effective by his reinterpretation of the classical story, painting a nude Leda whose erect, calm figure and loving expression is almost chaste and pure, turning Leda into a paradox. In his Leda, Leonardo uses the natural world as his initial point of contact for Leda, a figure who has more in common with the divine and with the abstract concept of transcendence than with human experience. In the Leda, Leonardo who had once been so concerned with the most detailed, precise scientific renderings of the natural world in order to reach as close as possible to the beauty of nature in all that he painted, and who labored over designs for the plaiting of Leda’s hair, embraces an abstract beauty which even he may not have understood. To paint the Leda was the only way to carry his investigation to its ultimate conclusion, not to express transcendence in a painting, but to afford the opportunity for transcendence for the viewer.

WORKS CITED Allison, Ann H. “Antique Sources of Leonardo’s Leda.” The Art Bulletin 56, no. 3 (September 1974): 375-84.

Bambach, Carmen, ed. Leonardo Da Vinci, Master Draftsman. Compiled by Rachel Stern and Alison Manges. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2003.

Brown, Alison. “’Natura idest?’: Leonardo, Lucretius, and Their Views of Nature.” Leonardo da Vinci on Nature: Knowledge and Representation, 2013, 153-79.

Brown, David Alan. Virtue and Beauty: Leonardo’s “Ginevra De’Benci” and Renaissance Portraits of Women : [National Gallery of Art, Washington, 30 September 2001-6 January 2002]. Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 2001.

Brown, David Alan, Giulio Bora, and Marco Carminati. The Legacy of Leonardo: Painters in Lombardy 1490-1530. Milan: Skira Editore, 1998.

Clark, Kenneth. “Leonardo and the Antique.” Leonardo’s Legacy: An International Symposium ed. by C.D. O’Malley, 1969, 1-34.

———. Leonardo da Vinci. Rev. ed. N.p.: Penguin Books, 1988.

Dalli Regoli, Gigetta, Romano Nanni, and Antonio Natali. Leonardo E Il Mito Di Leda: Modelli, Memorie E Metamorfosi Di Un’invenzione. Cinisello Balsamo (Milano): Silvana, 2001.

Farago, Claire J. Leonardo’s Projects, C. 1500-1519. New York: Garland, 1999.

Fehl, Philipp P. “In Praise of Imitation: Leonardo and His Followers.” Gazette des beaux-arts, no. 126 (1995): 1-12.

Freedberg, S. J. Painting in Italy, 1500 to 1600. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1971.

Hochstetler Meyer, Barbara. “Leonardo’s Hypothetical Painting of ‘Leda and the Swan.’” Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz 34, no. 3 (1990).

Jungiu, Josephine. 1997. “Savonarolan Prophecy in Leonardo’s Allegory with Wolf and Eagle”. Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 60.

Kemp, Martin. Leonardo Da Vinci, the Marvellous Works of Nature and Man. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981.

Kemp, Martin, and Alastair Smart. “Leonardo’s Leda and the Belvedere River-Gods: Roman Sources and a New Chronology.” Art History 3, no. 2 (June 1980): 182-93.

Maccurdy, Edward. The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci. N.p.: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1939.

Nathan, Johannes. “Some Drawing Practices of Leonardo da Vinci: New Light on the St. Anne.” Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz, nos. 36 (1/2) (1992): 85-102.

Ovid. The Metamorphoses of Ovid. Translated by Allen Mandelbaum. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1993.

Ovid, and Ovid, Heroides: And, Amores. Translated by Grant Showerman. London: William Heinemann, 1977.

Pedretti, Carlo. “The Burlington House Cartoon.” The Burlington Magazine 110, no. 778 (January 1968): 22-28.

Popham, A. E. The Drawings of Leonardo da Vinci. New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1945.

Richter, Jean Paul. The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci. New York: Dover Publications, 1970.

Royal Academy of Arts. “Leda and the swan, 1530s.” Royal Academy of Arts Collections.

Shell, Janice, and Grazioso Sironi. 1991. “Salaì and Leonardo’s Legacy”. The Burlington Magazine 133 (1055). The Burlington Magazine Publications Ltd.: 95–108.

Sword, Helen. “Leda and the Modernists.” Modern Language Association 107, no. 2 (March 1992): 305-18.

Tipping, Rebekah Christine. “A Poet’s Painting: The Creation and Reception of Michelagelo’s Leda and the Swan.” Master’s thesis, Washington University in St. Louis, 2001.

Vasari, Giorgio. Lives of the Artists. Translated by George Bull. Vol. 1. London, UK: Penguin Group, 1987.

Vickery, John B. “Three Modes and a Myth.” Western Humanities Review, January 1, 1958, 371-79.

How artists/authors use myths/Why Voorhies, James. “Fontainebleau.” The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Last modified October 2002.

Wallace, William. “Michelangelo’s Leda: The Diplomatic Context.” Renaissance Studies 15, no. 4 (December 2001): 473-99.

NAR | 27

art

enables us

to find ourselves and lose ourselves aT the same time.

-thomas merton NAR | 28