This chapter explores key works by sculptor and painter Lygia Clark and author Clarice Lispector. The chapter notes that although these women came from very different backgrounds, with Clark a daughter of the Catholic provincial elite and Lispector arriving in Brazil as a penniless, Jewish refugee escaping the pogroms of Eastern Europe, their careers had similar trajectories and explored similar themes of female interiority. The chapter compares their innovative works of the early 1960s and the artistic context that allowed them to emerge.

This chapter examines the ways in which Shelley’s works and reputation were mediated to Victorian audiences. It argues that the Victorians’ Shelley was to a large extent the Victorians’ creation; his reception in this period differed from both earlier and later understandings of his life and work. The chapter pays particular attention to the role of women such as Mary Shelley and Lady Jane Shelley in shaping the poet’s posthumous reception. It surveys several sites of reception, including editions, anthologies, sermons, statues, and Chartist meetings, to show how Shelley and his writings were appropriated, reimagined, and redeployed in a variety of new contexts by people with divergent aims and concerns. It briefly examines sculpted memorials to Shelley by Henry Weekes and Edward Onslow Ford. The chapter concludes that the Victorian understanding of Shelley was no more monolithic than the ‘Victorians’ themselves.

Percy Shelley’s interest in the visual arts (painting and sculpture, but also monuments and landscapes) was much heightened by the years spent in Italy, where in letters and notebooks, he records a wide range of encounters and sharpened his powers of observation, perception, and description. This chapter presents several important contexts and instances, from accounts in his letters to Thomas Love Peacock of the paintings in Bologna that particularly moved him (such as Raphael’s St. Cecilia), to his ekphrastic verses on a painting of the head of Medusa, to his wide-ranging descriptive notes on sculptures in Rome and in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. These are situated historically in terms of increased access to, and engagement with, the visual arts in the period, and as important sites for Shelley to work through the imaginative transmutation of the visual into the visionary in his own poetry and poetic theory.

Papal tombs are a primary source for the study of papal politics. This chapter gives a chronological overview of papal burials, from early Christendom to the end of the fifteenth century. It addresses questions of burial preferences, church topography (especially in St. Peter’s and St. John Lateran in Rome), as well as the individual appearance of each monument. For the late Middle Ages, the importance of artists to formal innovation is underlined (Arnolfo di Cambio) and set in relation to the patron’s choice of traditions the monument is meant to refer to in its placement and appearance – to antique, French, or Italian models. The increasing number of funeral monuments for members of the Church hierarchy, as well as for laymen, kings, and nobles, starting in the thirteenth century, stiffened the competition in monumental burial and increased the need to develop appropriate papal features.

Avowing that love awakens one’s attention to the material world and to one another, Corinne provides a theory for establishing human–nonhuman connection, the energizing and curative praxis of belonging with. The heroine’s thing therapy positively associates women with materiality and, while exercising her right to connect with things, she sustains her élan vital. This chapter argues that she harnesses her feminist thing theory to teach her lover to respect the female body’s integrity and rights and to challenge his repressive politics: If Oswald could belong with materiality by sensuously responding to things, he could remedy his commitment to abstraction and his nationalistic gender proscriptions. Diagnosing Oswald’s melancholy as also emerging from his identification with “modern” (post Renaissance) art, associated with Napoleon’s tyranny and a self-absorptive grief that paralyzes creative potential, Corinne offers a remedy: companionship with classical art. Her thing theory has political ramifications, for it provides a workshop for practicing an embodied cosmopolitanism that itself ameliorates nationalism’s intolerances.

This chapter examines how the Venus de Medici entered the historical storylines of eighteenth-century models of gender, and – once plundered by Napoleon and whisked to Paris – the narrative of artistic restoration and political liberty. The statue generated complex thing–human interactions, for viewers collapsing boundaries between marble and human flesh imagined the Venus as both a withdrawn ideal yet intimately connected to them: touching her, they measured her proportions and gauged her sexual “motives” while debating whether she met British standards of female modesty. Belinda, which alludes to the Venus, also engages in these activities as characters “measure” each other; the novel, however, incorporates those travelers’ debates about the Venus’s modesty, sexuality, and virtue to emancipate female characters from calculating standards that produce negative consequences such as racism and gender stereotyping. Embedded in Belinda, the Venus obliquely restores the right for Lady Delacour to her body and to invoke nonperfection and nonconformity as a just privilege.

This chapter shows how epigrams contributed to the formation and dissemination of literary criticism and theories of style, while also expressing ideas about literary history and the development of a given literary genre or τέχνη. These epigrams, which allowed their author to express ideas on literary tradition and style, were often written as pseudo-epitaphs for poets of the past. The use of companion pieces could also allow epigrammatists, such as Posidippus of Pella, Asclepiades of Samos, Dioscorides of Nicopolis and Antipater of Sidon, to comment on pairs of artists or poets who represented different and often opposing aesthetics. Posidippus’ and Dioscorides’ epigrams are of peculiar interest, since they seem to allude to lost treatises that used recurring frameworks to write the history of a given τέχνη, for example one of the visual arts or a literary genre. The ideas initially expressed in these prose treatises appear to have been reworked, in a very creative manner, by epigrammatists who were eager to formulate their own ideas about poetry.

Hellenistic Antioch remains poorly known. Yet the later city’s visual repertoire, whether through emblemata, entire tessellated surfaces, or sculpture in the round is a recursive celebration of a shared Hellenistic past.

This chapter engages with the concept of environmental violence to explore how art has witnessed and responded to human-produced pollution and its associated violence on human health and well-being. In this application of the environmental violence framing, this chapter seeks to deepen our understanding of the role of art in drawing our attention to the direct and indirect risks associated with anthropogenic pollution, ecological impacts, and climate change.

The introduction establishes the characteristics of divine music. Noting the discrepancies between the visual and literary accounts of the gods and the variability in the instruments with which they choose to perform, Laferrière argues that the gods’ active use of their instruments lends a sonic quality to their representation. In demarcating divine music-making as distinct from human musical practices, she shows that these images require a correspondingly distinct mode of interpretation and analysis, since the scenes feature musical performances that are undertaken outside the human world.

Aztecs were brilliant scientists, writers, and artists. Medicine is an example of their scientific activities. They developed ideas about the causes of illness, practical and supernatural. Priests and priestesses were involved in curing, but Aztecs had an array of healers. The most commonly used term by Aztecs for a doctor – someone with specific and practical knowledge about healing – was “ticitl,” female and male. That Aztecs wrote is not widely recognized. They used writing to name people, titles, places, and deities. Not merely pictography, their writing is complex and developed from the late prehispanic period into the colonial period. Their books recorded calendars, history, tribute payments, and succession to rulerships. They also created a rich oral literature, often expressed through songs. Many were ancient, others composed in the early colonial period. Those that became written in alphabetized Nahuatl dealt with deities, temples, flowers, lords, war, sexuality, even conquest and Christian worship. Also great artists, they were influenced by the art of earlier peoples and the Mixteca-Puebla style and worked in several media: architecture; monumental and small-scale stone sculptures; books; precious stones and gold work; textiles; dough sculptures; and paper. This art expressed an official ideology as well as resistance to it.

Victorian sculpture is less well-served by the scholarship than Victorian painting, and biblical sculpture ignored comparative to pieces inspired by Greco-Roman mythology. Rather than treat these as two separate strands, or, alternatively, assume that statues of Old Testament figures such as Eve and Rebecca were interchangeable with those of Venus and Psyche, this chapter thinks harder about how they relate. Looking first at free-standing sculpture, then at religious works in the private house, and finally at sculpture in the church, it hones in on affect to determine how the classical and biblical and the interactions and discrepancies between the two spoke to nineteenth-century British society, gender, belief and so on. As well as revisiting artists such as Thomas Woolner and John Gibson, it puts an emphasis too on women sculptors such as Emmeline Halse and on female representation, patronage and response to show that sculpture was as important in sermon-making as pictures.

This chapter surveys the broader social contexts for dissection, in four sections: public performance, animals, religion, and popular conceptions of anatomy. The first section offers the context for public displays of dissection, namely competing types of performance, including sophistic lectures, legal proceedings, and the general spectacle of the streets. The second focuses on animals and the various circumstances outside scientific dissection in which bodies were cut into and opened, with specific attention on butchery, veterinary practice, pharmacology, magic, and staged animal shows in the arena. The third turns to religious contexts, encompassing the practices of animal sacrifice and divination from entrails, as well as the Italic votive tradition, which included artistic representations of various internal organs, and the Egyptian practice of embalmment. Finally, there is a sketch of popular experience with and conceptions of bodily rupture and anatomy, ranging from postmortem punishments, public executions and gladiatorial displays in the arena, and military violence to literary descriptions of gore, artistic depictions of bodies, and intellectual engagement with anatomy.