Book by Amy Knight Powell
Papers by Amy Knight Powell
L'art médiéval est-il contemporain ? Is Medieval Art Contemporary, 2023
From medieval carrying cases made of treated leather to portable
paintboxes containing plein-air ... more From medieval carrying cases made of treated leather to portable
paintboxes containing plein-air sketches to Marcel Duchamp’s
monographic suitcases — works of art have long found their way
into and out of boxes with handles and clasps. This essay looks at
luggage in a recent installation titled "1961" by artist Zoe Leonard,
taking into account some of her photographic work and giving
special attention to a certain shape — the rectangle with rounded
corners — in order to see how Leonard turns the suitcase into an
icon of voyages through time rather than space and, in the
process, draws out the deep history of the rectangle’s powers of
analogical transportation.
Netherlands Yearbook for History of Art / Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek 72, 2022
Built on the remains of demolished and incinerated homes as a heavily
fortified home-away-from-ho... more Built on the remains of demolished and incinerated homes as a heavily
fortified home-away-from-home for the lives of European merchants,
Elmina Castle was the looming edifice of death from which the Portuguese
controlled the transatlantic slave trade along with their trade in African
gold and other commodities, through the first quarter of the seventeenth
century....In 1669, a now forgotten painter named Pieter de Wit made a portrait from life of the Director-General of the WIC in Africa Dirck Wilre in his luxurious apartment inside Elmina Castle. Or so the inscriptions on an oil painting on canvas, which measures 103.2 by 141.4 centimeters and is on loan to the Rijksmuseum from a private collection, would have us believe.
Contamination and Purity in Early Modern Art and Architecture, 2021
The Scientific Revolution was dirty: ‘now [the sun] shows itself to us as partly impure and spott... more The Scientific Revolution was dirty: ‘now [the sun] shows itself to us as partly impure and spotty,’ Galileo wrote after looking at that celestial body through a telescope in 1612. Like the telescope, the microscope revealed the generally mottled nature of things. This was an aesthetic problem. The revelation of spots, stains, and cavities turned perfectly whole bodies complicated and ugly. Meanwhile, the equally ‘impure and spotty’ theory of atomism began to take hold. But well before the popularization of the telescope and microscope or the admission of atomism to plausibility, the artist Pieter Bruegel the Elder unfurled a ‘dirty’ atomism across panel and paper.
Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics, 2020
All my thanks to Marika Knowles, Christopher Wood, and Roberta Wue, as well as Francesco Pellizzi... more All my thanks to Marika Knowles, Christopher Wood, and Roberta Wue, as well as Francesco Pellizzi and Shannon Wearing. 1. The print exists in only two impressions (in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, and the Kupferstich-Kabinett, Dresden), each of which is only about one half of the total plate. These were previously thought to be the two halves of a single impression, but Huigen Leeflang points out that they have a ship in common, which would have been in the center of the frieze, and that the composition of their grounds and inks differs. E. Haverkamp Begemann, Hercules Segers: The Complete
Cabinet, 2018
This is about the dominance of the rectangular format in a certain tradition of picture making, a... more This is about the dominance of the rectangular format in a certain tradition of picture making, a dominance that still holds today and extends well beyond the medium of painting. The book, the photographic print, the screen, and the museum — which has tended to favor this format — all guarantee that we encounter most pictures in rectangular frames....
Representations, 2018
In ‘‘The Crisis of the Easel Picture’’ (1948), Clement Greenberg compares the easel picture, disp... more In ‘‘The Crisis of the Easel Picture’’ (1948), Clement Greenberg compares the easel picture, disparagingly, to a box-like cavity cut into the wall. In this essay, I argue that late medieval panel paintings—which indeed often took the form of boxes—show Greenberg to be justified in making this comparison, if not in doing so disparagingly. But what Greenberg failed to fully acknowledge is that the easel picture had already long tried to escape this condition through the opening of the metaphor of the window. Failing to recognize this earlier effort to escape the material conditions of the box, many modernists and postmodernists, like Greenberg, attempting to move beyond the easel picture in the name of an art undivided from life, have unintentionally upheld the easel picture’s own escapist ideology.
Art History, 2017
To the artist in need of inspiration, Leonardo recommends: ‘look at walls splashed with a number ... more To the artist in need of inspiration, Leonardo recommends: ‘look at walls splashed with a number of stains or stones of various mixed colours’; the artist who can, in fact, pull new ideas from such inchoate forms proves himself worthy of the name. The motif of chance images – as it appears in the work of Leonardo and many others down to the present – generally takes image-making to be a productive, positive, and additive affair. In the wake of Reformation image breaking, however, specifically in certain modes of Dutch landscape painting, where the destructive, negative, and subtractive operations integral to image-making come to the fore, this motif takes an ironic turn. In this context, the erasure and alteration of earlier images emerges as integral to the artistic process – now understood less as the birth of the new than as the (sometimes violent) engagement with what was always, already there.
Art History, 2016
It was Galileo Galilei’s celestial observations published in "The Starry Messenger" of 1610 that ... more It was Galileo Galilei’s celestial observations published in "The Starry Messenger" of 1610 that made the telescope famous, but the device was more commonly used in the seventeenth century for terrestrial viewing. For this reason and thanks to a shared capacity to bring far away things close, the telescope and the genre of landscape are intimately related in ways that have not been fully worked out. Beginning with Jan Brueghel the Elder’s "Landscape with a View of Mariemont Castle" (c. 1609), which contains one of the first depictions of a telescope, this article describes how the genre was shaped, already in the sixteenth century — before the invention of the telescope proper — by fantasies of telescopy and, then, in turn, during the seventeenth century, by the reality of telescopic vision. The roundel format, I argue, was the clearest marker of this shaping.
Mathias Poledna: Substance, 2016
postmedieval, 2016
There is an encounter between two isomorphic things at the center of many fifteenth-and sixteenth... more There is an encounter between two isomorphic things at the center of many fifteenth-and sixteenth-century representations of the mass: the meeting of the Euchar-istic wafer and the celebrant's tonsure. By strategically juxtaposing the two or replacing the one with the other, the artists who orchestrate these encounters insist that the shared whiteness and roundness of these two objects not be overlooked. But no one seems to have noticed. Or, at least, no one seems to have cared enough to commit their noticing to paper. In this article, I take the encounter between the bread and the head if not entirely seriously – since that would miss its ever so slightly off-color humor – still very much to heart, as an instance of what Roland Barthes calls a 'perfectly spherical metaphor.'
Oxford Art Journal, 2015
In the 1920s, art historians Wilhelm Fraenger and Carl Einstein discovered a prefiguration of the... more In the 1920s, art historians Wilhelm Fraenger and Carl Einstein discovered a prefiguration of their own socio-political alienation in a relatively obscure seventeenth-century Dutch artist named Hercules Segers. In 2012, filmmaker Werner Herzog likewise found in Segers a kindred spirit. That year, Herzog contributed to the Whitney Biennial ‘Hearsay of the Soul,’ a five-channel digital projection of Segers’ etchings, which proclaimed Segers the ‘father of modernity in art.’ Fraenger, Einstein, and Herzog — each in his own way — claim an affinity with Segers and elevate him, in the process, over and above his historical context into a timeless avant-garde. In this article, I make the case that, though Segers’ prints do indeed exceed the moment into which the artist himself was born, the thread that binds Segers’ to more recent work is not a spectral parade of father figures. Rather it is the entirely visible thread of Segers’ marks. Tracing a genealogy of Segers’ line, I suggest that it derives from the vernacular of Reformation image-breaking and — having never been properly Segers’ own — opens onto the inexpressive, and non-mimetic, line of modern art.
Brooklyn Rail, 2014
At the time of Ad Reinhardt's early death in 1967 he was best known for his seminal black paintin... more At the time of Ad Reinhardt's early death in 1967 he was best known for his seminal black paintings, which had become recognized as forerunners of new artistic developments of the moment, such as Minimalism and Conceptualism. It is only now that the many and varied aspects of his career and life are becoming the focus of intense scrutiny and debate.
The Sensuous in the Counter-Reformation Church, ed. Marcia Hall and Tracy Cooper , 2013
Gesta, 2012
The steeply inclined ground planes of Early Netherlandish paintings are often covered with a drap... more The steeply inclined ground planes of Early Netherlandish paintings are often covered with a drapery so stiff and heavy that it seems to break rather than fold. Known as the hard style — in opposition to the soft style common at 1400 — this drapery tends to push up toward the flatness and verticality of the picture plane, where its angular folds rhyme reflexively with the rectilinear corners of the painted panels in which it appears.
Despite its sweeping generality and seeming anachronism, Wilhelm Worringer’s account of this drapery as a form of abstraction gets a good deal right. If Worringer is right—that what he calls Gothic drapery is, in an important sense, non mimetic — that drapery, especially in its late hard form, may be more “thing” than picture — “thing,” that is, in the specifically medieval sense that Friedrich Ohly describes. Ohly’s account of medieval Dingbedeutung (thing-meaning) lends unexpected support to Worringer’s abstraction thesis by demonstrating the centrality of formal properties to certain modes of medieval exegesis.
At the same time, Ohly’s work suggests an important corrective to Worringer’s formalism: because the formal properties of a painting relate it to all those things beyond its frame that share its properties, a painting should not be thought of as an autonomous entity. Reading Worringer through Ohly helps us see that the reflexive abstraction of hard-style drapery—with its flatness and its rectilinear folds, which echo the framing edges of the picture, particularly where they meet to form corners — opens the picture, in fact, first, to its own material substrate and, then in turn, to a wider world of things.
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Book by Amy Knight Powell
Papers by Amy Knight Powell
paintboxes containing plein-air sketches to Marcel Duchamp’s
monographic suitcases — works of art have long found their way
into and out of boxes with handles and clasps. This essay looks at
luggage in a recent installation titled "1961" by artist Zoe Leonard,
taking into account some of her photographic work and giving
special attention to a certain shape — the rectangle with rounded
corners — in order to see how Leonard turns the suitcase into an
icon of voyages through time rather than space and, in the
process, draws out the deep history of the rectangle’s powers of
analogical transportation.
fortified home-away-from-home for the lives of European merchants,
Elmina Castle was the looming edifice of death from which the Portuguese
controlled the transatlantic slave trade along with their trade in African
gold and other commodities, through the first quarter of the seventeenth
century....In 1669, a now forgotten painter named Pieter de Wit made a portrait from life of the Director-General of the WIC in Africa Dirck Wilre in his luxurious apartment inside Elmina Castle. Or so the inscriptions on an oil painting on canvas, which measures 103.2 by 141.4 centimeters and is on loan to the Rijksmuseum from a private collection, would have us believe.
Despite its sweeping generality and seeming anachronism, Wilhelm Worringer’s account of this drapery as a form of abstraction gets a good deal right. If Worringer is right—that what he calls Gothic drapery is, in an important sense, non mimetic — that drapery, especially in its late hard form, may be more “thing” than picture — “thing,” that is, in the specifically medieval sense that Friedrich Ohly describes. Ohly’s account of medieval Dingbedeutung (thing-meaning) lends unexpected support to Worringer’s abstraction thesis by demonstrating the centrality of formal properties to certain modes of medieval exegesis.
At the same time, Ohly’s work suggests an important corrective to Worringer’s formalism: because the formal properties of a painting relate it to all those things beyond its frame that share its properties, a painting should not be thought of as an autonomous entity. Reading Worringer through Ohly helps us see that the reflexive abstraction of hard-style drapery—with its flatness and its rectilinear folds, which echo the framing edges of the picture, particularly where they meet to form corners — opens the picture, in fact, first, to its own material substrate and, then in turn, to a wider world of things.
paintboxes containing plein-air sketches to Marcel Duchamp’s
monographic suitcases — works of art have long found their way
into and out of boxes with handles and clasps. This essay looks at
luggage in a recent installation titled "1961" by artist Zoe Leonard,
taking into account some of her photographic work and giving
special attention to a certain shape — the rectangle with rounded
corners — in order to see how Leonard turns the suitcase into an
icon of voyages through time rather than space and, in the
process, draws out the deep history of the rectangle’s powers of
analogical transportation.
fortified home-away-from-home for the lives of European merchants,
Elmina Castle was the looming edifice of death from which the Portuguese
controlled the transatlantic slave trade along with their trade in African
gold and other commodities, through the first quarter of the seventeenth
century....In 1669, a now forgotten painter named Pieter de Wit made a portrait from life of the Director-General of the WIC in Africa Dirck Wilre in his luxurious apartment inside Elmina Castle. Or so the inscriptions on an oil painting on canvas, which measures 103.2 by 141.4 centimeters and is on loan to the Rijksmuseum from a private collection, would have us believe.
Despite its sweeping generality and seeming anachronism, Wilhelm Worringer’s account of this drapery as a form of abstraction gets a good deal right. If Worringer is right—that what he calls Gothic drapery is, in an important sense, non mimetic — that drapery, especially in its late hard form, may be more “thing” than picture — “thing,” that is, in the specifically medieval sense that Friedrich Ohly describes. Ohly’s account of medieval Dingbedeutung (thing-meaning) lends unexpected support to Worringer’s abstraction thesis by demonstrating the centrality of formal properties to certain modes of medieval exegesis.
At the same time, Ohly’s work suggests an important corrective to Worringer’s formalism: because the formal properties of a painting relate it to all those things beyond its frame that share its properties, a painting should not be thought of as an autonomous entity. Reading Worringer through Ohly helps us see that the reflexive abstraction of hard-style drapery—with its flatness and its rectilinear folds, which echo the framing edges of the picture, particularly where they meet to form corners — opens the picture, in fact, first, to its own material substrate and, then in turn, to a wider world of things.