The feasibility of the application of image/signal processing for measuring, marking, matching, and sorting vast quantities of data derived from materials typically found in artworks is presented through four case studies. Different patterns produced by canvas weave structures, surface textures of historic photographic papers, chain line intervals in Rembrandt’s printing papers, and watermark variations have been subjected to different modes of computational analysis. The art-historical implications that result from computer-generated algorithms – including dating, attribution, authenticity, and workshop practices – can be considered as “computational connoisseurship.” The case studies discussed point to future areas for research. Finally, because of the need for statistically meaningful datasets of images, a practical means of recording internal paper structure is introduced.

This paper presents the rationale, genesis, and applications of Project Cornelia, an ongoing computational art history project developed by a cross-disciplinary team at the KU Leuven (University of Leuven). It shares practical perspectives acquired while conceptualizing and unfolding the project and discusses successes as well as challenges and setbacks. In doing so, this paper is a cautionary tale for art historians entering the digital arena. However, it is also an invitation to connect to Project Cornelia. Art historians seeking to avoid heavy start-up costs and willing to embed their research in a larger empirical and theoretical framework can easily share their data and use Cornelia’s data and tools to further their and our understanding of the genesis and governance of early modern creative communities and industries.

Henri Matisse (1869–1954) adopted medievalism, a motif of cultural resistance in Occupied France, as a symbol of national unity through his appropriation of the fifteenth-century poems of Charles de Valois, duc d’Orléans (1394–1465). Matisse saw parallels between the plight of the medieval poet, held captive in England, and his own circumstances in France during the Second World War. Begun in 1942, while recovering from his near-fatal illness, aided by his friend André Rouveyre (1879–1962), encouraged by the fugitive poet Louis Aragon (1897–1982), Matisse introduced covert symbols and coded messages of hope and rebirth into his book to highlight his nation’s heritage as he silently participated in the cultural battle that was being fought in France. This article analyses the aesthetic evolution of his wartime illustrated book Poèmes de Charles d’Orléans (1950), and examines his choice of poems, the handwritten text, his decorative illuminations, the images, d’Orléans’s portrait and the frontispiece within the context of the disruption to the French nation and his own personal circumstances.

In 1958, graphic designer Will Burtin’s (1908–1972) large-scale model of a basic cell, made of plastic and flashing lights, opened at the annual convention of the American Medical Association. It had been commissioned by Upjohn Pharmaceuticals, and was received with great enthusiasm. It subsequently traveled internationally, appearing widely in print and on television, and then settling for permanent exhibit at the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry. This interactive, multimedia exhibition was an example of a specific approach to scientific visualization that manifested new attitudes toward the power of visual material for American social progress. In the context of the Cold War, certain ways of employing “the visual” were deemed to be conducive to securing individual agency and human mental freedom. In the realm of mid-century corporate science and technology display, where designers and businessmen worked closely together, these new design techniques helped to make corporate activity appear coherent with these democratic ideals. An analysis of the sensory experience of the Upjohn cell model and its circulation demonstrates the key role that visual technology played in defining American citizenship as a practice of viewing visual media. Burtin’s design projects helped to affirm relationships between progress, democracy, and Western capitalism during the Cold War period.

Although Italian artistic influence never supplanted England’s longstanding and ongoing artistic relations with France and the Netherlands, in the era of Henry VIII (ruled 1509–1547) it became a significant element within it, partly for political reasons. In recent years, research on this subject has been active, revealing many connections between visual developments in England and Italy in a wide range of contexts. This article explores recent work on these complex intersections from the beginnings of the Tudor period to the early 1540s. Four key themes are discussed: Italian influences mediated through France and the Netherlands; the impact of the circulation of images in the era of print technology; Italian artists who worked in England; and the role of merchants. Through this survey, the article explains how standard work has been challenged and redirected on areas such as classicism; the importance of particular materials, objects, motifs, and techniques; the status of Italian artists who worked in England; and the sophistication of their English patrons. The article ends by noting how recent work on Italian merchants as mediators of Italian art and artists in England is aligning this area with the broader recent interest in the economics of art.

This issue addresses the long financial crisis of 2008 and the nature and diversity of artistic responses to it. This financial crisis is understood as a globalized result of late capitalism that nonetheless is experienced differently at local, regional, and national levels. It is multi-faceted in nature, a phenomenon that has historical roots and precedents that inform contemporary responses. Artists are not restricted to engage with the economy through one specific vehicle of inquiry or one type of medium and message. Therefore, the central question that this issue poses is: what is the artist’s role in finance, crisis, and the economy? Should artists: fix the economy; explain it; attempt to alter it; reject it; participate in it; or none of the above? The articles, artists’ projects and interviews presented here attend to these questions through a wide-ranging lens including: studies of historical precedents such as the Great Depression of 1929 and currency crises in Latin America in the 1970s; artistic direct interventions within financial systems that reveal and challenge their opaque processes and value systems; alternative currencies highlighting the neo-colonialism of global financial markets; and blockchain-based rethinking of art market ownership models. These multi-faceted projects spanning different time periods and geographies offer crucial and distinct theoretical positions. This issue, which saw its origins in a panel for the 2017 College Art Association Conference in New York City, adds to scholarship on these pressing topics and seeks to foster a continued discourse on the intersections of art and financial crisis.

This article focuses on a selection of nineteenth-century female art critics and connoisseurs who were prominent art writers of their day but whose contribution to the critical history of sculpture has since fallen out of view. I argue that women modelled a sculptural discourse that was distinctive, often personally driven and biographically inflected, and gendered. They deployed various forms of life writing – biography, autobiography, memoir, personal reminiscence, Bildungsroman, letters, gallery journals – as a vehicle for connoisseurship about sculpture. Cosmopolitan in outlook, they understood the importance of personal networks in both the production and the reception of art. Furthermore, female writers responded to the corporeal connections between viewers, models and figurative sculpture in their work. Writing about the three-dimensional representation of the human body in sculptural form enabled women to comment obliquely on issues such as female creativity, sexuality and education.

This article considers the archives of the American artist Carolee Schneemann (b. 1939), now held between Stanford University and the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, as a constitutive element of her performance practice. Analysis of items from these remarkable archives, such as sketchbooks, letters, and Life Books, in relation to her artistic output proper, aims to establish her critical attitude towards the structure of the traditional archive. Schneemann's documentation of her performance work through film and photography, and her re-use of such documentation in later projects, prompts further investigation into how time is structured in her work and restructured in its afterlife. The possible political implications of these tactics are then explored; the construction of self-image through autobiographical work, in tandem with her auto-archival practice, presents a feminist mode of inheritance in opposition to the logic of the traditional archive and the masculinist subject it presumes.