Academic literature on the topic 'Art in literature. Mural painting and decoration. Literature, Medieval'

The standard pictorial formula of Fuxi and Nüwa, a pair of indigenous Chinese deities, started to absorb new motifs from Buddhist art during the early medieval period when Buddhism became more prominent in China. In this paper, I focus on the juxtaposition of Fuxi-Nüwa and cintamani, a magic Buddhist jewel, depicted on the ceiling of the corridor in the tomb of Lady Poduoluo, Pingcheng, Shanxi (435 CE). Through a detailed visual analysis, I explain the multiple meanings embedded in the combination of the Chinese mythological figures with the Buddhist symbol in the funerary space, thus challenging the previous studies that understand cintamani only as a substitute for the sun and moon. This paper furthers the discussion on the hybrid image by investigating the mural painting on the ceiling of Mogao Cave 285 in Dunhuang. Despite their different spatial and temporal contexts, both the tomb of Lady Poduoluo and Mogao Cave 285 present a similar pictorial formula, featuring the hybridization of cintamani and the Fuxi-Nuwa pair. This phenomenon invites us to explore the transmission of such motifs. I, therefore, situate the production of the syncretic scheme of Fuxi-Nüwa with cintamani within a broader historical context and examine the artistic exchange between Pingcheng and Dunhuang by tracing the movements of images, artisans, and patrons in early medieval China.

This article is dedicated to the interpretation of the header before the text of the Ten Commandments on fol. 150 of the Hval Codex. The author is drawing attention to a gloss in the margin to the left of the banner which has not been addressed in the earlier scholarly literature nor recorded in the facsimile transcription of 1986. The rectangular banner consists of a lozenge net filled with gold lilies while three gold interlace crosses of a complex shape are placed on top of the banner. The gloss next to it was written in blue ink as an abbreviated word under a line. It is a rather common abbreviation from the nomina sacra category (God). The significance of this hitherto-overlooked gloss is extraordinary. It was written in the same manner which was used for adding legends to miniatures or headers in order to clarify images in medieval illuminated manuscripts. Hval wrote similar notes in several margins of this manuscript.The location of the gloss itself points to its function as an explanation of the banner before the words which the Lord communicated to Moses on Mount Sinai. That the text of the Ten Commandments was significant in Bosnian illuminated manuscripts is also attested to by the header before the Ten Commandments in a Venetian miscellany codex, which depicts the narrative scene of the theophany on Sinai while, at the same time, containing a fairly long inscription which clarifies the image. Similar textual clues appear in the Dobrejšovo Evangelie, the most important of which is the one positioned next to the Synaxarion header where the inscription, “this is heaven which is also called paradise”, explains the scene. In the context of such examples, this article discusses analogous material from illuminated manuscripts and monumental painting alike by applying a new approach to the study of function of medieval ornament, while also highlighting the problem of the etymology of the notion of ornament in different languages. The findings resulting from this research show that the function of ornament in a religious context was not just decorative, but that it was used to mark the holiness of a space, that is, the presence of the divinity, which is a phenomenon witnessed in illuminated manuscripts, wall paintings, icons and reliquaries.H. Kessler’s research into Judeo-Christian symbol-paradigms confirms the essential importance of the depiction of the Old Testament tabernacle in the manuscripts of the Christian Topography as a source of ornamental motifs. They can be grouped into a relatively narrow set of symbols, always included in a structural system: star-shaped schemes, fields of flowers, interlace and lozenge nets as well as chequers. Their origin is found in the coffered vaults of classical tombs and temples where they represented the sky and Elysium. They were transported to medieval art through identical motifs which were painted in the catacombs and early Christian basilicas. It is these exampes that constitute a formal template for the header to the Ten Commandments in the Hval Codex the meaning of which is, therefore, a symbolic depiction of the Word, Logos, as the source of God’s Ten Commandments, which is why the banner was marked with a corresponding gloss.The article also pays attention to an unusual illumination in the Gospels of Jakov of Serres because it also witnesses that a grid with floral motifs possessed a special meaning to educated medieval men. The portion above the head of Metropolitan Jakov, formed by a band of a lozenge net with flowers, has been described in the scholarship only as decorative, that is, as forming a floral background, but, given that its position and shape both conform to signifiers of heavenly kingdom in Byzantine manuscripts of the Christian Topography, it is erroneous to interpret it only as a floral background and a mere ornament. In this case too, the lozenge field filled with flowers denotes the Empire of God to which Jakov directs his prayers. Therefore, when one studies ornament in a religious context, it is necessary to use a more precise language, one which is rooted in the manuscript material itself. A concrete evidence for such a practice can also be seen in the colophon of this manuscript because the scribe who wrote it compared all of the decoration in the codex to the starry sky of a theological rather than actual kind.Other notes in the Hval Codex margins are also mentioned in the article. Some of these record the name of the manuscript’s commissioner who was addressed out of respect as uram (Hungarian for “my sire and master”): Hrvoje Vukčić Hrvatinić, Grand Duke of Bosnia and a Herzog of Split. The article emphasizes the need to study more closely the location of glosses and all other marginal notes within the codex, and highlights the fact that the two notes recording the name of the patron were placed next to the Gospel sections describing Christ’s healing miracles which, generally speaking, figure prominently in Christian art and exegesis. Furthermore, the article also analyzes the previously-unpublished illumination which depicts Moses in front of the Burning Bush, the branches of which were rendered as interlace ornament resembling a labyrinth. The rendition of the Burning Bush as interlace stemming from the floral frame of the header is a unique example which demonstrates that medieval art did not consider ornament as a meaningless arabesque but that it frequently functioned as a signifier.

The article explains the role of extra-musical factors in the creation of the compositions, caused by the action of the art synthesis as a cross-cutting theme of the composer’s creativity in the European tradition. In the academic art, this phenomenon has acquired the status of the program method, which to some extent has directed the listeners’ perceptions. The actualization of the present topic and its predetermined task is to determine the degree of the correlation of the semantics of a new composition to its artistic original, since it is precisely on the “artistic type translation” that both the programmability and the ways of its implementation by means of the performing interpretation depend. The object of the article is the programmability as a condition of the composer’s idea; the subject is the author’s concept of “The Ancient Kiev Frescoes” by A. Stashevsky for the accordion, implemented in the genre-stylistic system of the individual and national-musical thinking. The purpose of the article is to identify the genre-stylistic factors of the author’s conception of the selected composition, which reflects the sound-poetic ideas about the ancient history of the native land, while forming the national memory of the modern Ukrainian. Analysis of the recent publications on the research topic. Among the fundamental works devoted to programmability, we should point out the works by V. Konen, which trace the tendency to expand the limits of programmability in music at the expense of non-musical influences, as well as those by M. Lobanova, who characterizes the synthetic genres (opera, theatre music, ballet, program symphony) in the historical dimension. G. Khutorskaya owing to the introduction of the category “interspecific translation” into the scientific circulation explains the means of the synthesis of arts in vocal compositions [5]. The interspecific interaction of the theatre, painting, dance, poetry and literature contributes to the reproduction of the complete picture of the world in music. The material for the development of the problem is the composition for the accordion called “The Ancient Kiev Frescoes” by A. Stashevsky, one of the bright representatives of the modern accordion school of Ukraine. Observing the author’s premieres (in particular, the accordion compositions) in the quality of a professional listener, one can state that his creativity has become an important part of the musical culture of the Slobozhanska Ukraine. As a multifaceted personality – an accordion performer, teacher, composer, and scientist – he embodies new ideas, genre-style models and corresponding techniques of the performing skills in his activities. A comprehensive analysis of the genre stylistics and a personal view of the performance dramaturgy of the interpretation of the program cycle have been given. “The Ancient Kiev Frescoes” by A. Stashevsky (2005), besides the program name, have a genre refinement of the “suite-notebook”, which contains the key to understanding the essence of the stated program. First, the notebook (the album) is holistic, and contains information about interrelated events of a certain era, arranged in a timeline (the linear sequence). Secondly, the pages of the notebook can be represented as the planes where the images are located – the frescoes of St. Sophia Cathedral in Kiev. The most valuable decoration of the cathedral is the mural, which has been preserved for centuries and is an example of the skill and artistic taste of ancient Ukrainians. In general, St. Sophia Cathedral embodies the philosophical credo of the era with its national idea, the expression of the spirituality of the Christian worldview. There are nine parts in the suite-notebook, each with a program title. The author’s idea is realized, on the one hand, through the programmability of the picture type, when the parts of the suite cycle constitute a single composition that is associated with a multi-figured mural (with its mosaic, stained glass). It is impossible to capture it at one glance, so getting acquainted with it implies a consistent arrangement of the fragments of the whole in time. On the other hand, there is a pervasive narrative throughout the cycle: all the parts sound attacca. The pages of the chronicle seem to be expanded in the temporal axis; there is also a general logic of changing the various musical murals that is subordinate to the latent programmability: from “Intrada” to the climax in Part 8 and Part 9 an associate connection (a story line) is established. Programmability-driven musical stylistic contains repetitive segments of the author’s language focused on archaic styling. Because of the singing type of thematism, the ostinato nature and variability of the means of its development, the expanded fret and tonal nature, the mosaic principle of the stringing of the motives, and their combining. In the conclusions it is emphasized that in the program composition for the accordion A. Stashevsky skillfully realized his plan as a projection on historical, musical-performing and picture-everyday images-echo. The incarnation of the ancient history of Kievan Rus by means of the fret-harmonious, texture-timbre and compositional-dramatic means fully presents the author’s conception of the composition – the harmony of a man and history, the updating of the Past, in order to understand one’s own mental foundations, self-awareness in the national cosmos and logo.

The question of colour in architecture offers many potential points of entry. Taking an historical standpoint, one could discuss the use of bright colour in ancient Greek and Roman architecture, the importance of brilliantly coloured mosaic and stained glass to sacred architecture in the Byzantine and medieval periods, and the primacy of colour in non-Western architectural traditions both ancient and modern. It would be possible to trace prohibitions against the use of applied colour, derived from late 18th century notions of architectural morality—ideals demanding authenticity, honesty and directness in the expression of structure, function and materials. This puritan strand could be pursued into the modern movement, to its quasi-pathological attachment to whiteness.1 It would also be possible to note a trend which ran counter to dominant modernist attitudes to colour, in the eclectic 'neon historicism' of so-called 'post-modernist' architecture. But while it would be remiss of me not to acknowledge the history of colour in architecture in passing, it has been well addressed elsewhere, and is in any case outside the scope of this paper.2 What is significant is that this history is marked throughout by many of the same, largely unspoken, prohibitions against colour that can be traced across other cultural realms—that which David Batchelor has described as a history of 'chromophobia'. As Batchelor writes; 'Chromophobia manifests itself in the many and varied attempts to purge colour from culture, to diminish its significance, to deny its complexity…. [T]his purging of colour is usually accomplished in one of two ways. In the first, colour is made out to be the property of some 'foreign' body—usually the feminine, the oriental, the primitive, the infantile, the vulgar, the queer or the pathological. In the second, colour is relegated to the realm of the superficial, the supplementary, the inessential or the cosmetic. In one, colour is regarded as alien and therefore dangerous; in the other it is perceived merely as a secondary quantity of experience, and thus unworthy or serious consideration.'3 Numerous examples of the attempt to 'purge' colour can be identified throughout the history of architecture in the modern period. The mode of chromophobia particular to architecture may be summarised thus: colour in architecture has been associated with illusion and frivolity, and thus with decoration—it has been seen as being excess or supplementary to 'real' architecture.4 Discussions of colour in architecture can never be completely distinguished from discussions of ornament, or of materials and materiality. Colour is not necessarily a problem in itself—it is acceptable, for instance, when it is inherent to the material or to its weathering process, as in the bright green of copper verdigris. It is the application of colour, in the form of paint or stain, that raises questions of authenticity. The importance of surface and colour have been consistently made subordinate to architectural form; and the idea that colour is acceptable in interiors but not exteriors is merely the expression of another hierarchy, linking and demoting the trivial, contingent, feminised interior in favour of universal, masculinized, heroic external form. In the modern period, a work of 'serious' Architecture (as opposed to vernacular, commercial, or 'popular' architecture) has most often either been white, or coloured in the subdued palette afforded by the inherent characteristics of 'natural' materials.5 This is nowhere more true than in institutional architecture generally, and museum architecture in particular. Museums and their stake in the neutral monochrome The museum as an institution has traditionally functioned as a symbol of the establishment and its authority, a symbolic role often expressed in conventionally monumental architecture. This monumentality has, in turn, been reinforced by prestigious materials: much of the dignity and status of institutional architecture is taken from materials valued for their expense, rarity, or durability.6 Museum buildings are required to last, and thus they must not only use enduring materials, but materials which demonstrate their durability by being self-finishing in their natural, apparently neutral, state. The very idea that 'natural' materials are also somehow 'neutral' opens onto another, more ideological investment that the museum has in avoiding colour. Museums have long held a stake in the idea of an objective stance, and maintained the pretence of an unmediated presentation of historical fact. The notion of the museum as 'white cube' embodies all of this—the idea of the white cube, with its aformal form and achromatic colour, signifies purity and transcendence. Just as the whiteness of modern architecture was a continuation of the hygienic whiteness of doctor's coat, bathroom tiles, and hospital walls, the whiteness of the museum signifies clinical objectivity.7 It also, perhaps more significantly, stands for the ideal of the tabula rasa, the clean slate upon which the documentary evidence of art, history, or any other metanarrative could be methodically examined and arranged. For the museum, abandoning the neutrality of its public presentation may also mean a symbolic abandonment of objectivity. It would mean, if not a surrender to partiality, at least the admission of partiality—and the renunciation of universal whiteness for the specificities of colour. In the modern period, applied colour can never be neutral, but is read as mask, disguise, or stain. In the postmodern period, the discourse of the 'new museology' has challenged and discredited many of the ideological complicities of the idea of the museum as 'white box', linked as they are with a suspiciously absolutist rhetoric of abstract purity. Museums have increasingly begun to render explicit their role in the re-presentation of history, and to work at recontextualising ideas and artefacts. But even if a critical and self-reflexive stance is now more common in museological practice, it has taken much longer to begin to inform museum architecture. It would be a very courageous museum indeed that was willing to cash in all of the chips of its cultural authority, of which prestigious monumental architecture is a particularly powerful source. Most museums are still, if not white, at least respectably neutral, inside and out. But not so the National Museum of Australia (NMA). This museum, in its polychromatic formal complexity, could hardly be further from a 'white cube' museum. The National Museum of Australia: flirting with the flippant The NMA is housed in a loud and gregarious building. From its controversial strategy of literally appropriating elements from other canonical modernist works, through the coded messages of the Braille patterns on its surface, to the device of the extruded string and red 'knot' which passes through and around the building's form, it is relentless in its challenge to conventional institutional architecture. This is nowhere more true than in its colouration—there is hardly a neutral tone in sight. For that matter, there is hardly a 'natural' material in sight either—the majority of the building is constructed from pre-formed aluminium panelling in grey, yellow, red and khaki, crossed in places by sweeping calligraphic symbols.8 The dramatic aerial loop at the museum's entry is white and bright orange. There are walls of black dimpled pre-formed concrete, blue painted poles (get it?), a 'Mexican wave' of multicoloured steel sheets, and of course the richly cacophonous Garden of Australia Dreams. There are also some deliberate plays on colour symbolism—Le Corbusier's gleaming white modernist classic, the Villa Savoye, is reversed and reconstituted in black, corrugated steel. The fact that this forms part of the Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies is a hint of the building's clear, even dangerously frank, employment of colour symbolism. Given the architects previous work, we can safely assume that in this case, as elsewhere in the building, the choice of colours is calculated for maximum rhetorical effect. But I am less concerned here with the specific ploys of the architects than with the ways in which the building's reception has been conditioned by its employment of colour, specifically the ways in which it has been construed as populist. The NMA has polarised the architectural community in Australia. While much of the comment directed at the building has centred around its contravention of standards of taste and propriety in civic architecture, I would argue that this is only the symptom of a deeper reaction against its apparent frivolity, as signified most strongly by its colour. This is exemplified in a critique of the building by Stephen Frith, a respected Canberra academic. Concluding a polemical review in the Canberra Times, Frith asks: But why such tongue-lashings and breast-beatings over what has quickly established itself as a happy theme park to mediocrity? Surely its condoning of the ruthless kitsch of petty capitalism in its imagery and finishes provides for some spectre of merit? The problem becomes one of the civic domain in which architecture and its rhetoric is interpreted. For a supposedly public work, the museum is an intensely private building, privately encoded with in-jokes, and in the end hugely un-funny... The confection of cheap cladding and plasterboard is a spurious sideshow of magpie borrowings passing themselves off as cultural reference...9 Everything in this passage decries what Frith reads as the NMA's verisimilitude of popularity - the reference to theme-parks, sideshows, commercialism - a confection constructed with poor quality materials and finishes, which nevertheless flirts 'pretentiously' with the canon of modern architecture. To Frith the building reads not as a cheap and cheerful reflection of the Australian vernacular, but as a demeaning attempt to raise a laugh from the elite at the expense of the uncomprehending masses. His complaint is thus two-fold—that the building has insufficient gravitas, and that this is compounded rather than redeemed by the fact that it is not truly popular at all, but rather 'intensely private'. There is an important distinction to be made here, then, between 'populism' and 'popularity'. Populism has the negative connotation of deliberately seeking popular acceptance at the cost of quality, intellectual rigour, or formal aesthetic value. 'Popularity' still retains its more neutral modern sense, either of actual public involvement, or of things that are socially recognised as popular. In architecture, populism is already hedged about with prohibitions springing from the idea that a deliberately populist architecture is somehow fraudulent. A piece of serious, civic, monumental architecture should neither set out expressly to be popular, nor to look like it is, so the logic goes: if a work of high architecture happens to gain popular acclaim, then that is a happy accident. But there are significant reasons why such popularity must be seen to be incidental to other, more lofty concerns. Given that colour is seen to be 'popular', a highly coloured building is thus assumed to be 'lowering' itself in order to appeal to popular taste. Old systems of thought endure, and both museums and architecture are each subject to an unspoken hierarchy that still sees 'populism', if not actual popularity, as inferior. Conclusions: colour as the sign of a critical engagement But there is another possible reading of the NMA's apparent populism. I would argue that the building in fact presents and problematises the question of popularity in formal architectural terms. This leads to a proposition: that there is a 'look' of populism that exists independently of any intended or actual popularity, or even a connection with popular culture. I would argue that the NMA opens an elaborate play on this 'look' of the popular, and that it does so by manipulating certain key aesthetic devices: literal and figurative elements, visual jokes, non-orthogonal forms, and most significantly, bright and mixed colour. Such devices carry a weight of expectation and association, they cause a building to be read or socially recognised as being populist, largely as a result of pre-existing dichotomies between 'high' and 'low' art. In this conception the NMA, turning the modernist prohibition on its head, uses colour as the deliberately frivolous disguise of a profoundly serious intent. Rather than concealing the absence of meaning, it conceals an overabundance of meaning—a despairing accumulation of piled up allegories, codes and fragments. It is thus deeply ironic that the NMA has been read as a light, flippant, and populist confection, since I would argue that it could hardly be further from being those things. Rather than taking the usual path, of seeking cultural authority through allusion to traditional monumental architecture, the NMA makes perverse references to the seemingly trivial, commercial, and populist. The reasons why the architects might want the building to be (mis)read in this way are complex. But by renouncing the aesthetic trappings of a serious institution, the NMA reveals the very superficiality of such trappings. Furthermore, by renouncing the 'look of authority' in favour of colour, frivolity, and apparent populism, it introduces a note of doubt. Could the building, and thus the institution - a national museum, remember, charged with representing the nation and placed in the national capital - really be as flippant as it seems? Or is there some more subtle game afoot, a subversive questioning of accepted notions of Australian national history and national identity? I would argue that this is so. In the NMA, then, colour is the sign of a critical engagement. It positions the building itself as a discourse or discussion, not only of architectural colour as conferring inferiority and flippancy, but of a lack of colour as conferring authority and legitimacy. Of course, it is precisely because of architecture's history of chromophobia that colour can itself become a tool for subversiveness, provide an invitation to alternative readings, and collapse unspoken hierarchies. In this respect, the colour in and of the NMA provides an emblem of that which has long been marginalised in architecture, and in culture more generally. Notes 1. Mark Wigley writes that the primacy of whiteness in high modernist architecture (particularly the work of Le Corbusier) lies partly in the removal of decoration. '[The] erasure of decoration is portrayed [by Le Corbusier] as the necessary gesture of a civilized society. Indeed, civilization is defined as the elimination of the 'superfluous' in favour of the 'essential' and the paradigm of inessential surplus is decoration. Its removal liberates a new visual order. Echoing an argument at least as old as Western philosophy, Le Corbusier describes civilization as a gradual passage from the sensual to the intellectual, from the tactile to the visual. Decoration's 'caresses of the senses' are progressively abandoned in favour of the visual harmony of proportion.' Mark Wigley, White Walls, Designer Dresses: The Fashioning of Modern Architecture, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1995, pp. 2-3 2. See for example John Gage's superb and authoritative history of the use and meaning of colour, Colour and Meaning: Art, Science and Symbolism, Thames and Hudson, London, 1999. For a survey of the use of colour in architecture, see Tom Porter, Architectural Colour: A Design Guide to Using Colour on Buildings, Whitney Library of Design, New York, 1982, or the more recent Architectural Design Profile number 120: Colour in Architecture, AD, vol. 66, no 3/4, March/April 1996. These are only a few examples of the available literature. 3. David Batchelor, Chromophobia, Reaktion Books, London, 2000, pp. 22-23. 4. The notable exception to this - the architecture of schools is emblematic in itself: colour is appealing to children, so the logic would go, because they have undeveloped, 'primitive' tastes. 5. William Braham has perceptively examined the allure of 'natural' materials and colours in the modern period. He writes that 'the natural can only be understood as a somewhat flexible category of finishes, not by a single principle of use, manufacture, or appearance. The fact that a family of paint colours neutrals, ochres, and other earth colours fit within the definition of natural is only partly explained by their original manufacture with naturally occurring mineral compounds. Though they are opaque surface coatings, they resemble the tones produced in natural materials by weathering.' He goes on to say that the 'natural/neutral palette' is characterised by 'the difficult pursuit of authenticity', and this question goes indeed to the heart of the issue of colour in architecture. William W. Braham, 'A Wall of Books: The Gender of Natural Colours in Modern Architecture', JAE Journal of Architectural Education, vol. 53. No.1, September 1999, p. 10. 6. But perhaps more important than actual durability in institutional architecture is the appearance of durability, and this appearance is undermined by protective treatments like paint, whether coloured or not. Materials which are seen as flimsy or fragile may as well be coloured, so the logic goes, since they require constant re-painting anyway, and since it fits their low status. 7. Mark Wigley, White Walls, Designer Dresses: The Fashioning of Modern Architecture, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1995, p. 5. 8. Aluminium panelling is a new technology and a new material one that was unknown in the high modernist period but which is becoming increasingly ubiquitous today. The fact that aluminium panelling is coloured during the manufacturing process opens a new and interesting question: is this colour inherent, or is it simply applied earlier in the building process? Is it, in other words, an 'honest' or a 'dishonest' colour? Given that aluminium does have its own colour, and that it can be lacquered or anodised to retain that colour, it seems that the aluminium panelling of the NMA have been received as 'dishonest'. 9. Frith, 'A monument to lost opportunity', The Canberra Times, 20 March 2001 Citation reference for this article MLA Style Stead, Naomi. "White cubes and red knots" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5.3 (2002). [your date of access] < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0207/whitecubes.php>. Chicago Style Stead, Naomi, "White cubes and red knots" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5, no. 3 (2002), < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0207/whitecubes.php> ([your date of access]). APA Style Stead, Naomi. (2002) White cubes and red knots. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5(3). < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0207/whitecubes.php> ([your date of access]).