This dissertation explores complex representations of spiritual, social and cultural ways of knowing embedded within engraved ivory drill bows from the Bering Strait. During the nineteenth century, multi-faceted ivory drill bows formed an ideal surface on which to recount life events and indigenous epistemologies reflective of distinct environmental and socio-cultural relationships. Carvers added motifs over time and the presence of multiple hands suggests a passing down of these objects as a form of familial history and cultural patrimony. Explorers, traders and field collectors to the Bering Strait eagerly acquired engraved drill bows as aesthetic manifestations of Arctic mores but recorded few details about the carvings resulting in a disconnect between the objects and their multi-layered stories. However, continued practices of ivory carving and storytelling within Bering Strait communities holds potential for engraved drill bows to animate oral histories and foster discourse between researchers and communities. Thus, this collaborative project integrates stylistic analyses and ethno-historical accounts on drill bows with knowledge shared by Alaska Native community members and is based on the understanding that oral narratives can bring life and meaning to objects within museum collections.

This Master's thesis locates four works by William Dyce inspired by Dante Alighieri's Commedia: Francesca da Rimini (1837), Design for the Reverse of the Turner Medal (1858), Beatrice (1859), and Dante and Beatrice (date unknown) in the context of their literary, artistic and personal influences. It will be shown that, far from assimilating the poet to a pantheon of important worthies, Dyce found in Dante contradictions and challenges to his Victorian, Anglican way of thinking. In this thesis these contradictions and challenges are explicated in each of the four works.

Western landscape photography helped to create an imaginative perception of a new nation for Americans. Early nineteenth-century photographers captured a vision of uncharted terrain that metaphorically fulfilled a two-fold illusion: an untouched Eden and a land ready and waiting for white settlement. The sublime and picturesque experiences of the West provided artists a concept that could be capitalized upon by employing various forms of manipulation. In the twentieth-century, the role of landscape photography evolved as did the advancement of the West. Images of wilderness became art and photographers chose to view the western landscape differently. Some focused more sharply and critically on the relationship between the land and the people who lived on it. The influential exhibition in 1975, New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-altered Landscape presented work that showed a landscape altered, marked by power lines, houses, and fences. The West as Eden no longer existed. Today, photographers continue to examine, image, and experience western land anew. In this thesis I examine the relationship of contemporary landscape photography and the role of the West, guided by an analysis that traces the history of American ideologies and attitudes toward natural land. The artists I have chosen recognize landscape not as scenery but as the spaces and systems people inhabit, and use manipulative strategies that emphasize an artificial character of the West. Their work elicits antecedent mythologies, pictorial models, and American ideologies that continue to perpetuate internationally.

The early-16th-century manuscript commonly known as the Geese Book (New York, Morgan Library, M. 905) contains the entire Mass liturgy sung by the boys choir of the parish church of St. Lorenz in Nuremberg, Germany prior to the Reformation. This thesis addresses the location and function of the sometimes enigmatic marginalia and the decorated or historiated initials in this large two-volume gradual. The paper begins with an analytical case study of a scene within the margins in which a wild woman, wielding a club, confronts a female dragon who has taken a child. Subsequently the size, subject matter, and physical positioning of the illuminations and decorations within the book and on its pages are examined with respect to the gradual's liturgical contents. It is hoped that through such methods, new conversations may begin as to the roles that marginalia and decoration may play within the multiple organizational schemes within a musical text of this kind.

This study examines transnational connections between art as advertising and the tourism industry. The development of railroads, and later airlines, played a crucial role in the growth of travel. Art posters supported this expansion. By the mid-twentieth century, art posters gained wide acceptance for encouraging leisure travel. Posters and paintings were constructed by artists to visualize destinations, underscoring the social status and modern convenience of tourism. This thesis describes how advertising, as an aspect of popular visual culture, offered compelling parallels to stylistic developments in modern art.

Matilda of Canossa (1046 to 1115), the Great Countess of Tuscany, was a noblewoman, a warrior, and a papal supporter who later generations adapted to satisfy a variety of cultural and ideological interests. Matilda's life as a ruler was amplified over the following five hundred years in an avalanche of words and images that served many purposes. This thesis considers the art produced during her lifetime in the context of disputes over papal authority, as well as art produced about Matilda subsequently. The study includes a discussion of her appearance in Dante's Comedy; her importance to Florentine artists such as Sandro Botticelli, Leonardo da Vinci, and Michelangelo Buonarroti in the 16th century; and concludes with the significance of the elaborate tomb sculpted for her reburial by Gian Lorenzo Bernini in St. Peter's Cathedral. An examination of Matilda through these shifting representations from the 12th to the 17th century enables an understanding of how and why she became an impressive symbol in the visual arts. Finally, the study examines the process through which a strong, powerful woman was transformed from an historical person to a legend. Matilda's remarkable life and myth is still relevant to art historical, religious and cultural studies because of the pervasiveness of her influence a millennium after her death.

From inception, the earliest museums in Europe were a haven for artifacts, many of which represented world cultures within its walls. The tradition of encyclopedic collecting characterized European museums and U.S. institutions modeled themselves after this example. In the 20th century, defining cultural property, in the form of excavated objects, became a priority for many nations and resulted in the scrutiny of ancient artifacts, in particular. This led to the establishment of international protocols which sought to protect items during times of both peace and war. Despite international legislation, the trade of illicit antiquities continued. A major advocate for repatriation, the nation of Italy aggressively sought return of many objects from antiquity and recently approached the Metropolitan Museum of Art regarding several items whose provenance was suspect. Ultimately the conflict was resolved through The Metropolitan Museum of Art-Republic of Italy Agreement of February 21, 2006, which transferred the title of six antiquities to Italy in return for long term loans of equivalent objects to the museum. The landmark agreement represents a mutually profitable resolution to a situation potentially plaguing thousands of institutions worldwide. The implications of replication of the agreement can potentially change how museums, nations and the public understand concepts of ownership and may reduce the role of permanent collections in favor of sharing, rather than possessing, world heritage.