Art History Midterm Checklist

Author's Name: Spalding, Frances
Title of the Article: NOTES FROM THE FIELD: Contingency.

Nowhere is the contingent more fully woven into the fabric of art than in Early Netherlandish painting, owing to the merging of the real with the divine, the homely with the symbolic. In London's National Gallery, a fine example is the Madonna and Child attributed to Robert Campin, where the rush-plaited fire screen behind the Madonna's head simultaneously acts as a halo. In modern and contemporary art the contingent is more usually a check or a balance, an unexpected ingredient that acts strategically within the whole. Whether it affronts or attracts, teases or informs, subtly or dramatically it invigorates and transforms. Contingency may, in the minds of philosophers, be the inferior partner of necessity, but necessity is all the better for it.

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Author's Name: Miller, Julia I.
Title of the Article: Miraculous childbirth and the Portinari altarpiece.

Hugo van der Goes's Portinari Altarpiece is perhaps the single most studied Flemish painting of the later fifteenth century (Fig. 1). As the painter's key work, and one of the largest, best-preserved, and most influential altarpieces from its period, the triptych has warranted the close study of its iconography, patronage, and style which it has generated for decades.[1] It has, however, been largely overlooked as a representative of a type of altarpiece which has been investigated with vigor in recent years: that is, a painting made for the chapel of a hospital.[9] The lack of focus on the altarpiece "in context" may be due to a variety of reasons, foremost among them that although the painting was commissioned and painted in Flanders, it was destined for a remote site--the small church of S. Egidio, which functioned as the chapel of Florence's largest hospital, S. Maria Nuova. One of the few scholars to have considered the question of the painting's installation, Shirley Neilsen Blum, has pointed out that there is no evidence that Hugo van der Goes ever traveled to Florence, or had anything but the most superficial awareness of the ultimate destination of the altarpiece.[3] On the basis of these and other factors, such as the absence from the triptych of Saint Giles, the eponym of S. Egidio, Blum concluded that the painting should be analyzed as a strictly autonomous work consistent, in both style and iconography, with other works in Hugo's oeuvre.[4] In addition, the expressive power of Hugo's images and the compelling evidence of his troubled life have encouraged an examination of his works as the personalized outgrowth of his imagination, and the embodiment of symbolic themes relevant to his own devotions.[5]

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Author: Michael Baxandall,
Title of the Article: Painters and Clients in Fifteenth Century Italy, 1972.

A distinction between the value of precious materials and on the one hand and the value of skilful working of materials on the other is now rather critical to the argument. It is a distinction that is not alien to us, is indeed fully comprehensible, though it is not usually central to our thinking about pictures. In the early Renaissance, however, it was the centre. The dichotomy between quality of material and quality of skill was the most consistently and prominently recurring motif in everybody’s discussion of painting and sculpture, and this is true whether the discussion is ascetic, deploring public enjoyment of works of art, or affirmative, as in texts of art theory…. One paid for a picture under these same two headings, matter and skill, material and labour….

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