This paper analyzes Jewish historic revival architecture to better understand the popular presentation of Jewish history in all its culturally situated complexity.

Session: History Writing and Its Popular Reception in Jewish Communities of 19th-Century Central Europe.

Historic libraries are coming into their own as resources for interpreting intellectual history. Analyzing those libraries that have informed art historians, art critics and their public has opened new paths for exploring art historiography. Whether book and manuscript collections survive intact, perhaps in their original locations, or are known only through bibliographies or inventories, they yield information that broadens established narratives of the discipline. What is more, such collections are ideally suited to documenting art history’s evolving relationship with social, intellectual and geopolitical currents.

This session builds on a theme introduced at CAA 2019 by addressing new questions, incorporating new methodologies, and introducing previously untapped collections. New questions include, for example, the distribution and impact of “official” vs. “unofficial” resources in the Communist-era library of the Polish Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Art. New methodologies include data visualizations of the readership of an art library given to the University of Paris in 1918; the visualizations incorporate quantitative and prosopographical data. Previously untapped libraries include that of Charles Eastlake, which served him in his several roles, including as Director of the National Gallery, London. Comparative analysis of Eastlake’s library with those of precursors and contemporaries underlines how readily analysis of any one library aids and encourages the analysis of others. Taken as a whole, this session highlights how libraries not only inform but also shape the relatively young and still restive discipline of art history.

Historic libraries offer underutilized resources for understanding art history. This session explores the potential of such collections – whether intended explicitly for the study of art or not – to deepen and broaden our interpretation of art historiography and its relationship to social, intellectual and geopolitical currents. Libraries significant for these purposes include those of Count Leopoldo Cicognara, Rodolfo Lanciani and the twelfth Duke of Osuna, formed in the eighteenth through twentieth centuries and largely intact, as well as those that survive partially or in inventory form, such as that (c. 1600) of Xu Bo. Cicognara’s library, for example, offers a view of the history and geography of art at a key moment for shifting geopolitical conceptualizations of Europe. President of the Venetian Academy of Art when Venice shifted from Napoleonic French to Habsburg Austrian control, Cicognara wished his library to contribute to Italy’s ability to compete for cultural eminence. For him, as for scholars throughout post-Napoleonic Europe, study of artistic heritage and shaping nationhood went hand in hand. But his collection, like others of its day, reflects more than patriotism. It underlines his effort to define an inchoate discipline through a wide spectrum of printed materials, including ephemera. It also demonstrates his active participation in art historical debates and connections with artists and arts administrators in Italy and beyond. By addressing Cicognara’s, Lanciani’s, Osuna’s and Xu’s libraries using diverse methodological lenses, this session seeks to expand avenues into the history of our discipline.

In 1821 Leopoldo Cicognara published a bibliography that still stands as a milestone in the history of art librarianship: it records a key collection assembled shortly before the establishment of art history as an academic discipline. Conceptualized as a database, his Catalago ragionato provides a basis for digital visualizations that offer fresh insights, because they render an array of bibliographical attributes and themes easy to assess and explore. Preliminary results indicate that such explorations could challenge initial expectations and inform our understanding of the inception of art history as a discipline.