Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann

• Professor at Princeton University

This essay reconsiders two of the most famous monuments in Poland, the Warsaw Castle and the Sigismund Column. It argues that both evoke imperial themes, with reference to a model provided by the Habsburgs for both the architecture and the sculpture, but present them in ways that specifically express the ambitions of the Vasa dynasty.

The project of global art history calls for balanced treatment of artifacts and a unified approach. This volume emphasizes questions of transcultural encounters and exchanges as circulations. It presents a strategy that highlights the processes and connections among cultures, and also responds to the dynamics at work in the current globalized art w...

Edited by Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, Princeton University, USA, Catherine Dossin, Purdue University, USA and Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel, École normale supérieure, France StudieS in Art HiStoriogrApHy 'Like people and ideas, art objects travel, and they have been doing so from time immemorial. Surprisingly, art history has largely neglected to systematica...

The essays on “Images of Rule” in this issue of Art Journal address a perennial topic with many implications for questions of interpretation. Since antiquity, artifacts have been made to represent or to symbolize persons or ideas connected with control, government, sway, or dominion. Effigies of Egyptian pharaohs and of such Sumerian and Akkadian r...

All rulers' portraits are, in several senses, forms of representation. In the first and most obvious instance, all portraits epitomize one of the basic functions of visual art as imitation ( mimesis ). Portraits represent a person by providing his or her likeness. The Renaissance sculptor Vincenzo Danti (1530–1576), a contemporary of the artists di...

This essay, part of a special issue on the Warburg Institute and Library, offers personal recollections of scholars whom the author encountered there as a student in the early 1970s, including E. H. Gombrich, Otto Kurz, Michael Baxandall, Frances Yates, D. P. Walker, A. I. Sabra, Michael Podro, Michael Screech, Arnaldo Momigliano, and Nikolaus Pevs...

This essay presents a critique of recent historiographic considerations of German art historians in the United States. It traces this history back to Johann Valentin Haidt in the eighteenth century. Using Princeton as a point of reference, it traces the innovations in the history of the discipline in the United States that were developed largely in...

This essay originated as an editorial for an issue of Perspective devoted to periodization. It traces the critique and dismantling of this conception in art history, and argues that even most recent literature suggests that the problematic of periodization has not been resolved, and will not easily be.

Jacopo Strada (1515-1588) is probably best known for his concern with antiquarianism and architecture. But like many other artists, scholars, and entrepreneurs of his day, Strada had interests that may be described as encyclopedic, ranging from his effort to compile a polyglot dictionary, to his assembling books of designs for goldsmiths' works, to...

Notions of nature and art as they have been defined and redefined in Western culture, from the Hippocratic writers and Aristotle of Ancient Greece to nineteenth-century chemistry and twenty-first century biomimetics. Genetically modified food, art in the form of a phosphorescent rabbit implanted with jellyfish DNA, and robots that simulate human em...

Art history traditionally classifies works of art by country as well as period, but often political borders and cultural boundaries are highly complex and fluid. Questions of identity, policy, and exchange make it difficult to determine the "place" of art, and often the art itself results from these conflicts of geography and culture. Addressing an...

This essay deals with some ideas about artistic geography expressed by authors from the later 16th to early 18th century that may be related to the Baltic region. After defining what the geography of art may be, a summary is presented of the thoughts of a variety of Netherlandish, Polish and Swedish writers that may be connected with some aspects o...

Journal of the History of Ideas 62.3 (2001) 523-541 In light of postmodernist and poststructuralist trends in the humanities which have contested notions of originality and of authorship, it might seem surprising that one outstanding myth of the eighteenth century has not yet been thoroughly challenged. This is the claim made by Johann Joachim Winc...

The artistic geography of America is one of the many topics that George Kubler suggested for study. Some of Kubler¿s ideas in diverse essays are examined by Kaufmann, who reiterates the necessity of reformulating geographic maps according to a different criterion from that of political borders. The studies of artistic routes and locations must not...

With its reputation for openness, Amsterdam is a good place to reconsider the vexatious question of Eurocentrism and the historiography of art. Although even those who decry “Eurocentrism” note that the term is difficult to define,1 it might appear easy enough to describe some of its symptoms in this case. The absence of any non-European art from t...

The collapse of Communism in Central and Eastern Europe opened the doors to cultural treasures that for decades had been hidden, forgotten, or misinterpreted. Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann looks at Central Europe as a cultural entity while chronicling more than three hundred years of painting, sculpture, and architecture in Germany, Poland, the Czech Rep...

The following checklist contains references to drawings by artists active in the lands comprised by the Holy Roman Empire, 1540–1680, regardless of their place of birth. All drawings found in North American collections of which the compiler is aware have been included. This census is intended to complement the exhibition and catalogue Drawings from...

A series of recent discoveries calls for the reinterpretation of the fabled and long misunderstood collections of the Emperor Rudolf II of Habsburg (reigned 1576–1612). Since Julius Von Schlosser's treatment of the late Renaissance Kunst- und Wunderkammer, Rudolf's collections have until recently been regarded as a kind of circus sideshow lacking a...

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Harvard University, 1977.

In Giuseppe Arcimboldo’s most famous paintings, grapes, fish, and even the beaks of birds form human hair. A pear stands in for a man’s chin. Citrus fruits sprout from a tree trunk that doubles as a neck. All sorts of natural phenomena come together on canvas and panel to assemble the strange heads and faces that constitute one of Renaissance a...