This MEMS endowment, established to honor the scholarship, teaching, and mentorship of Professor Emerita Diane Owen Hughes, is used exclusively to support graduate research and travel. Recipients of these funds will be known as Diane Owen Hughes Scholars.
MEMS was pleased to award the 2024 Diane Owen Hughes Scholarships to Julia LaPlaca and Bailey Sullivan.
Bailey Sullivan, History of Art
At the end of September 2024, with the generous financial support from the Diane Owen Hughes Scholarship administered by the MEMS program, I spent two weeks traveling in Europe to conduct research for my dissertation, tentatively titled “Imagining the City in Late-Medieval and Early Modern Germany.” This dissertation, which takes on the development of Stadtansichten, or city-views, across different artistic media and explores how depictions of the city were utilized to explain the world of the medieval viewer, rapidly evolved over the course of the summer with a new focus on the city-views made by artists from Franconian circles. This meant that I needed to add an additional stop to see the Schottenaltar, located in the Schottenstift in the center of Vienna.
The Schottenaltar is a remarkable object which is directly germane to Chapter Two of my dissertation. The largest extant altarpiece in Vienna was painted by the so-called Master of the Schottenaltar, who is associated with workshops in Franconia. The entire altarpiece, comprising 21 panels, contains no less than
two separate views of the city of Vienna and one view of the town of Krems (located 70 kilometers west of Vienna): the panel representing the Flight into Egypt shows Vienna from the south; the panel representing the Visitation shows a view inside of Vienna of the Seilergasse; and the panel representing Christ Carrying the Cross shows a view of Krems .Being able to look at this altarpiece in person critically shaped my understanding of it. What stood out to me was the care taken to represent the view of Vienna on the panel depicting the Flight into Egypt, and the visual emphasis of the city in the composition: the background, where the city-view lies, takes up at least one entire third of the painted plane. While minute details in the view may not have been especially visible to the medieval viewer—who likely viewed this altarpiece from a bit further away than I had the pleasure of viewing it—the general contour of the city of Vienna is immediately recognizable. This is in part due to the artist striving for topographical
wholeness, a part artistic, part cartographic, and part representational practice which I will further explore in Chapter Two of my dissertation, and which I began to fully appreciate on this research trip. Taking photographs of these three different panels on the Schottenaltar additionally supported my research by providing a visual record of what the viewing experience of the altarpiece was like, which is more easily captured by camera than by the digitizations of the panels that are available online.
After having visited the Schottenaltar two separate times, I spent time in the Medieval and Renaissance Study Collection in the palace stables of the Belvedere. Quite accidentally, I stumbled upon a heretofore unresearched city-view —a panel painted by a follower of Lucas Cranach the Elder. Although the museum does not provide identifying information, it was immediately obvious to me that this panel depicts a (approximately) veristic view of a real medieval city. Since this painting was painted between 1510–20, while Lucas Cranach lived in Wittenberg, I was able to identify the spire of this painting as possibly belonging to a medieval monument in Wittenberg, that is likely not extant today.
Overall, this research trip helped me to come to important conclusions and new discoveries. I am grateful to the MEMS community for their financial and scholarly support, and I look forward to incorporating this Fall’s research trip into my next draft of Chapter Two of my dissertation.
Julia LaPlaca, History of Art
“Woven Flesh, Woven Stone: The Affordances of Tapestries in Altar Environments, 1350-1580”
With the support of the Diane Owen Hughes Scholarship, I conducted research for my dissertation “Woven Flesh, Woven Stone: The Affordances of Tapestries in Altar Environments, 1350-1580” in Germany, France, and Switzerland. This project studies tapestries made to adorn altars and seeks to bridge the gap between the often siloed discourses on tapestry and the development of images on late medieval and renaissance altars. Specifically, I analyzed how tapestries acted as “meta” objects, by drawing attention to their
materiality.
My trip had three strands of research avenues: private close-looking sessions with curators, library visits, and more general visits to important collections and monuments. I had special meetings with curators or conservators at the Bavarian National Museum (BNM, Munich), the German National Museum (Nuremberg), the Cathedral Treasury (Sens, France), and the National Museum of Switzerland (Zurich). During these meetings, I was able to examine objects and files in storage, collect data for my dissertation, and make mportant networking connections with professionals in my field. For example, I was able to take lots of documentary photographs of two tapestries, now at the BNM and Sens Cathedral treasury respectively, that will be the focus of one of my chapters. I have established good rapport with the curators at these institutions who are willing to help me with further research requests.
I also conducted research at four different libraries: the Central Institute for Art History, (Munich), the CEREP-musées (Sens, France), Departmental Archives of Yonne (Auxerre, France), and the Abegg Stiftung
(Riggisberg, Switzerland). I read the most recent scholarship being produced in my subfield and looked at primary source material. Most importantly, I studied some of the earliest textual sources– inventories from the 16th-century– that describe two of the tapestries I will write about in my dissertation.
Finally, I visited different sites where some of the tapestries I am researching were originally used, for example, St. Sebald and St. Lorenz in Nuremberg and the Cathedral of St. Jean in Lyon. While I was traveling, I also made sure to visit important monuments and collections that are pertinent to the history of textiles and visual culture in northern Early Modern Europe, like the Chartreuse de Champmol monuments and Museum of Fine Arts in Dijon, the Bern Historical Museum– renowned for its important collection of tapestries, the Diosecan Museum in Bamberg, and the Albrecht Dürer house and Tucherschloss in Nuremberg.
Overall, this research trip was very productive and yielded rich material to analyze in my dissertation. I also achieved important networking goals that will support my professional development as I progress in the field.
2022 Diane Owen Hughes Scholar
Brenna Larson, History of Art
Project: Reconsidering the Practice and Oeuvre of Ludovico Brea
I traveled to western Liguria this past summer to examine paintings at the core of one of my dissertation chapters. The Observant Dominican complex of San Domenico in Taggia was founded in 1456 by a friar from Milan who saw the strategic utility of building a convent in Taggia, an important crossroad for merchants and travelers in the region. The church complex is unusually dense with works from the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries and is an important case study for Ligurian art production. Between 1488 and 1513, the painter Ludovico Brea completed five altarpieces and a series of frescoes for the complex. Brea’s work at San Domenico directly led to his employment at Santa Maria di Castello in Genoa, a site that occupies two of my dissertation chapters.
On site, continuities across the paintings were apparent in ways that had been inaccessible in reproductions. The church was, and continued to be, dedicated to the Madonna della Misericordia, and this legacy speaks in Brea’s corpus. In at least two instances (altarpieces dedicated to St. Catherine of Siena and the Madonna of the Rosary), Brea modified his iconographies to satisfy the namesake of the church and the patron of the chapel. These site-specific continuities in Brea’s corpus provide a structure with which to explain some of the diversity of his formats and iconographic points of reference. I was also able to see for the first time some of the technical diversity in the paintings: various techniques were used for faces and figures, both within individual panels and across polyptychs, demonstrating the formative role of collaborative work in Brea’s career.
The town of Dolceaqua provided access to Brea’s altarpiece of St. Devoté (1515). That painting varies dramatically in format and technique from other paintings completed by Brea and his workshop around the same time, and complicates existing narratives that try to explain the lack of consistency in his oeuvre.
