5/20/2023 0 Comments D. alexander gregory entangler art![]() This pervasive orientation, and the challenges and affordances that it offered visual media, contributed to many of the distinctive features of what is called Renaissance art: naturalism, perspective, story-telling, anachronisms of various kinds, and new forms of artistic self-awareness. More than any other artistic tradition in the history of art, European art of the period 1300-1500 was dedicated to depicting far-away people, places, and things, and to connecting those places to local realities. Lately, my interests have turned to questions of physical orientation and configurations of place in early modern European art. I am regularly asked by contemporary art journals, exhibition organizers, and lecture conveners to comment on recent artistic developments within a larger historical framework, or more often recently, on events of 500 years ago in their contemporary resonance: the violent takeover of Tenochtitlan and the destruction of the Aztec population by small pox (1520-21), the slave rebellion against the Spanish on the island of Haiti and the first circumnavigation of the globe (1522)-these events offer much to reflect on in the current moment. ![]() I have also maintained an active interest in contemporary art, mostly because I see in its expansion of global reference and in its retrospective cast a set of problems that encourage taking the long view. Trained as an historian, I came to art history to understand the specific ways in which material artifacts shape meanings and structure ways of being in an environment, as well as what happens when works of visual art and models of art-making cross temporal and geographical boundaries. My work is focused mostly on European art of the period 1300-1700, and is mostly concerned with how art allows humans to think through time and find orientation in the world.
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