The purpose of this study was to study the costumes of the Il-Khanid, Timurid, and Safavid dynasties between the end of the thirteenth and middle of the sixteenth centuries to (1) establish a chronology of costumes for the three periods, and (2) relate the stylistic changes in c…
The momei genre can be documented precisely from its recognition in the early 12th century through its formative period. It presents a highly specific test-case for the development of scholar-painting genres. This study accounts for the birth of a new painting genre (momei) in t…
Geghard, the Monastery of the Holy Lance, includes within its walls a free-standing church with its gavit' (Armenian type of narthex), and two rock-carved chapels and gavit's, dating from 1215 to 1288, all with the original sculptured reliefs essentially intact. This sculpture, …
This dissertation examines the life of artistic achievement of Fang Ts'ung-i (ca.1301-1378+) and attempts to illuminate his work within Chinese religious, intellectual, and aesthetic tradition. Chapter One describes the evolution of Taoist religious organization from the post-Ha…
The great Justinianic basilica of Hagia Sophia is the pinnacle of early Byzantine architecture, and recognized as one of the great architectural achievements of all time. Despite this, detailed analytical studies of the building are few. This remains surprisingly unstudied by sc…
This dissertation charts the continuing development of a sculptural genre--niche decorations from monumental tombs of Byzantine Egypt--during that transitional period in which paganism and Christianity coexisted. The niche decorations possessed both visual force and personal sig…
During the twelfth century, a major building campaign was undertaken at the Benedictine abbey of Santo Domingo de Silos, a great artistic center of Spain. The clear intention to integrate the new galleries of the lower cloister with the older structure, associated with the monas…
This dissertation comprises an analysis and a critique of a theory of ornament formulated during the 1840s and '50s by a small circle of artists, architects and critics for use in Britain's Schools of Design, a new system of State-sponsored institutions set up to educate industr…
This study examines modernization and Ottomanization in the Ottoman Empire and the genesis of a neo-Ottoman architectural tradition during the period of reform between 1839 and 1914. The Anatolian Turkish city of Bursa is the focus of an examination of modernization and Ottomani…
The focus of this dissertation is on painted pottery from Corinth, Attica, and Laconia found in Egypt. (Although Boeotian and Euboean painted vases may have been exported to Egypt in antiquity, it cannot be established that vases of either fabric have been excavated from Egyptia…
The Mongol rulers of the Yuan dynasty became actively involved with the visual arts, and this involvement constitutes an important chapter in the history of court painting and patronage in China. Textual evidence concerning their collections and commissions is presented in the f…
Al-Ashraf Sayf al-Dìn Qa'it Bay, sultan of the Mamluk empire from 872-901/1468-1496, was the greatest patron of art and architecture in the Circassian Mamluk period. Coming to the throne after fifty years of political, economic, and artistic decline, he reestablished the authori…
To date, major research studies on the contemporary arts of Africa span, in their coverage, sub-Saharan African. Discussions of art works are subordinated to considerations of art training programs or brief biographical sketches of the artists' careers. While these fundamental s…
This dissertation examines the first decade of travel photography through the study of three well-known artistic and literary figures who journeyed to Egypt with a camera from 1839 to 1850. Its emphasis is on their individual reactions within a network of socially constructed me…
The five concertos by Charles Camille Saint-Saens (1835-1921) were the first works in that genre to be written in nineteenth-century France. The composer, a versatile musician of strong intellectual and imaginative power, was one of the great pianists of his era, and his concert…
The concept of Zion has long functioned as a synoptic metaphor for the North American continent and its possibilities as a New World promised land. The privileged place of the Holy Land within the early American Protestant imagination was reinforced by years of exposure to hymns…
Pieter Aertsen (1507/08-1575) was born in Amsterdam but spent much of his working career in Antwerp where in 1535 he became a master in the painters' guild. Aertsen executed many altarpieces and genre pictures in his lifetime but he is best known as the founding master of Nether…