Department of Art History and Art Conservation Graduate Theses

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The French Confiscation of Perugino’s Paintings and the Reputation of the Artist, 1797-1815
(2024-09-18) Prieur, Cynthia; Art History; Hoeniger, Cathleen
In 1797, the citizens of Perugia anxiously witnessed the pillaging and removal of their most prized cultural treasures during Napoleon Bonaparte’s first military campaign on the Italian peninsula (1796-1798). Despite resistance from the locals, many paintings, rare codices and manuscripts, and other culturally significant objects were stripped from the city’s ecclesiastical institutions, libraries, and municipal buildings. These confiscated objects were crated and transported to France as part of a greater plan developed by the French government, known at that time as the Directory, to augment the national art and book collections at the museums and libraries of Paris, including the Musée Central des Arts, the Bibliothèque Nationale, and the Institut de France. To successfully organize the confiscations, a group of scientists and artists, many of whom were highly respected in their fields, were appointed to a special committee known as the Commission à la recherche des objets des sciences et des arts dans les pays conquis par les armes de la République. The commissioners travelled with the French army to Italian cities, where they were tasked with researching, selecting, and organizing the transportation of works of art to Paris. In most circumstances, they followed the terms set out in the peace treaties signed by regional leaders, including the Duke of Parma, the pope, and others, which often ceded a pre-determined number of art objects. However, a few cities were plundered indiscriminately, the most notable of which was Perugia. The looting of the city has been attributed to one commissioner by the name of Jacques-Pierre Tinet. According to the Armistice of Bologna signed on June 23, 1796, the pope had ceded three paintings from Perugia. Tinet was tasked with collecting these paintings and surveying the remaining works of art in the city. However, rather than restricting himself to the treaty’s terms, he sought out, discovered, and confiscated some of the most important cultural treasures of the Perugians. Twenty-two paintings by the Quattrocento artist Pietro Perugino were among the works of art taken. This dissertation will present the first dedicated study on the fate and fortune of the artist’s looted paintings, tracing their selection and transportation from Perugia to Paris. The first chapter will offer an investigation of Perugino’s reputation in France between the 16th and 18th centuries, examining how Giorgio Vasari’s “Vita di Pietro Perugino pittore” negatively impacted the artist’s literary reception. It will consider how Vasarian tropes about Perugino were proliferated in texts by art critics André Félibien and Rogier de Piles, as well as in popular 18th-century French collection catalogues by Louis-François Dubois de Saint-Gelais, Pierre-Jean Mariette, and François-Bernard Lépicié, which included biographies on the artist. The discussion of Perugino’s reception in France, prior to the arrival of his paintings in Paris in 1798, will set the stage for the examination of the reasons why the French army appropriated his works. Subsequent chapters will offer different facets of how the artist’s paintings were integrated into the Musée Central des Arts collection after their arrival, namely through their restoration, display, and the carefully curated narratives presented about the works in exhibition catalogues. The conclusion will consider the final fate of Perugino’s paintings and how the envoi system, developed in 1801, caused the dispersal of his works among provincial museums and churches. It will then examine the aftermath of the relocation of Perugino’s works to France, highlighting the shift in the artist’s reception among 19th-century French academicians and art theorists who visited the exhibitions in Paris and the regional cities featuring the artist’s works and began showing a renewed interest in studying the artist’s contributions to the Umbrian school of painting.
Global Narratives and Knowledge Production in the Collection of Nicolaes Witsen
(2024-09-17) Conlin, Rose Marie; Art History; Dickey, Stephanie
The Amsterdam burgomaster and Dutch East India Company director Nicolaes Witsen (1641-1717) compiled an extensive collection of material goods, natural specimens, and an immense visual archive of images, rivalling princely collections outside the Dutch Republic. Witsen’s collection did not exist solely for his personal pleasure nor to supplement his reputation but was used as an ever-developing research tool in Witsen’s endeavours to acquire, distribute, and process information. This dissertation seeks to illuminate how Witsen used his visual archive to supplement his investigations and those of a global network of correspondents. First, it identifies important figures in Witsen’s collecting network and analyzes the epistemological values informing their discussions to determine how Witsen valued and employed images to supplement research pursued alongside his peers, and as tools of eyewitness testimony. Second, I present two case studies based on objects once in his collection, considering their global narratives and how they reflect the variety of functions objects in collections performed in early modern discourse. The first case study examines an album of painted plant studies originating from Batavia (today Jakarta, Indonesia). It analyses the album’s material origins and content and considers how Witsen employed the album and its images to supplement the resources of the Amsterdam Hortus Botanicus. The second case study examines the evidence for painted portraits, now lost, of two men abducted from the island New Guinea, identified by their Dutch-given names Pieter Geel and Jan Craanvogel. It considers how Witsen used images and his reports from his network to investigate the peoples inhabiting New Guinea and the portraits’ function as evidentiary images testifying to Witsen’s authority on the subject by documenting his personal encounter with the two men, also recorded in verbal accounts. This dissertation asserts that images held an authoritative position in Witsen’s collecting and research, functioning as both testimonies to lived experiences and tools to reliably re-present global subjects otherwise inaccessible at the various stages of inquiry pursued by the armchair traveller and his contacts.
Integrating Life Cycle Assessment and Material Suitability Testing: Selection of Sustainable Foams for Supporting Artifacts in a Canadian Context
(2024-09-05) O'Connor, Megan Alicia; Art Conservation; Murray, Alison; Kim, Emy
As the materials available for cushioning and supporting artifacts change due to innovation, forthcoming policy initiatives, and the growing spotlight on sustainability, it is likely that products available to the cultural heritage field will be different in the coming decades. This thesis project investigated nine different foams for cushioning and supporting cultural heritage artifacts, consisting of recycled content low-density polyethylene (LDPE) foams, a biodegradable LDPE foam, a bio-based foam, and Canadian-made virgin LDPE foams. A life cycle analysis (LCA) using secondary data from the ecoinvent (version 3.9.1) lifecycle inventory database, manipulated using OpenLCA software (version 2.0.2), compared the relative environmental impacts of each foam. The LCA was paired with traditional material suitability tests typically employed in cultural heritage to facilitate decision-making about the potential for a material’s use with cultural heritage artifacts. Three levels of assessment were undertaken, reviewing technical data, executing simple qualitative testing (Oddy testing and compression set testing), and performing compositional analysis (Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy and pyrolysis gas chromatography-mass spectrometry) to identify potential contents that may negatively affect artifacts. When LCA results and material suitability analysis were considered together, the recycled-content LDPE foams EcoFoam 1.7 and Ethafoam SRC had low global warming potential and presented promising chemical and physical characterization results indicating their potential for temporary use cushioning and supporting artifacts.
Sex and Gender in the Biotech Century: Locating the Corporeal Body in SubRosa’s Cyberfeminist Art
(2024-08-29) Douglas, Anna; Art History; Kennedy, Jen
This thesis examines the cyberfeminist praxis of the artistic collective subRosa who used 1970s feminist tactics, such as performance and body art, to explore the ways that digital and biotechnologies ideologically, socially, politically, and culturally transformed corporeal bodies in their technologically-mediated present. Through a close analysis of their early performance-based work, Sex and Gender in the Biotech Century (2000) (later retitled The Sex and Gender Education Show), this thesis explores how subRosa engages the tactics of 1970s feminist art and politics 1) to show how performance practices bring the experientiality of embodied particularities to the centre of cyberfeminist discourses in the 1990s, and 2) to argue that body art provides the necessary conditions to explore the reproductive body as the site of biopolitics. Sex and Gender in the Biotech Century probes how reproductive technologies co-opted the language of “choice” politics associated with reproductive rights discourses, and, in doing so, shifted social and political perceptions on reproductive rights and justice in the 1990s. subRosa’s approach to performance, and the use of body art in their work, situates the corporeal body as critical to the histories of 1990s feminisms and cyberfeminisms.
Being “Other”: Ana Mendieta’s Artistic Practice and Feminist Politics within Arts Institutions
(2024-07-29) Alejandria, Cassidy Joy; Art History; Kennedy, Jen
This thesis examines the art and politics of Cuban American artist Ana Mendieta through her engagement with three arts institutions: 1) the University of Iowa; 2) Heresies: A Journal of Feminist Art and Politics; and 3) Artist in Residence Gallery (A.I.R.). I explore these three institutions specifically to illuminate how their unique structures provided Mendieta with essential opportunities and confronted her with challenging constraints that would shape her artistic practice and Third World feminist politics. Her practice and politics were both rooted in her experiences of difference after being exiled from Cuba in 1961 and her journey to reconnect to her homeland. During the 1970s and 1980s, women of colour describing themselves as “Third World women” began seeking an alternative means of feminist organizing that embraced their multiplicity, based on coalition-building and tactical alliances. Throughout her life, Mendieta was committed to uplifting Cuban and other Latin American artists, and, through her institutional work, she showcased her commitment to uplifting Third World women through a politics of being “Other.” By approaching Mendieta’s practice through her work with arts institutions, this thesis connects her artistic practice to the important feminist activism that Third World women were doing at the time.

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