The accommodation of sustainability in the EU Internal Market public procurement system

The main aim of this paper is to analyse the accommodation of sustainability considerations within the European Union’s (EU) Internal Market public procurement (PP) system. The paper investigates whether EU PP law can be used as a tool to further sustainability while advancing its main objective of removing barriers to trade and opening PP markets

Transcriptions and Synopsis of Selected Witnesses for the Pseudo-Oecumenian Catena on Ephesians

Transcriptions of seventeen Greek manuscripts of the Pseudo-Oecumenian Catena on Ephesians (CPG C165), consisting of the following New Testament witnesses: GA 075, 91, 627, 1905, 1907, 1916, 1919, 1923, 1932, 1971, 1980, 1982, 1997, 1998, 2011, 2183, 2962. Synopses of the three types of catena scholia: normal, extravagantes, Photiana. Created in conjunction with a doctoral thesis submitted to the University of Birmingham in 2024

‘Medieval Islamic objects and the architecture of the mind’. Review of: Arts of Allusion: Object, Ornament, and Architecture in Medieval Islam by Margaret S. Graves, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018, 339 pp., over 100 col. plates and b. & w. illus., £68 hdbk, Print ISBN 9780190695910, Online ISBN 9780190695941.

This review examines the monograph of Margaret Graves, Arts of Allusion, which offers a nuanced argument about visual representation in a disparate group of portable objects dating to between the ninth and thirteenth centuries and created in the heartland of the medieval Islamic world. The study focuses on what Graves calls ‘archimorphic objects’: portable objects that reference architecture in some way, either through their form or ornament. While many studies have pointed to intriguing formal similarities between small objects and monumental buildings in the medieval Islamic tradition, Graves breaks new ground in her exploration of what the allusion to monumental architecture in portable art reveals about the viewers and makers of these objects. Her detailed analyses of numerous objects that were both quotidian and fabulously crafted demonstrates the importance of allusion, metaphor, and other indirect forms of expression to the mechanics of representation in both visual and literary arts in medieval Islamic civilization

Palladio drawings in Britain: half a century of research

The Royal Institute of British Architects possesses one of the finest collections of architectural drawings and one of the jewels in its crown are over three hundred drawings by the celebrated Renaissance architect Andrea Palladio. Although cataloguing these drawings began in the 1960s as of late 2023 no printed catalogue has been published. This article examines the historiography of Palladio drawings in Britain: half a century of research, in order to set out what many of the issues regarding the project have been in the last fifty years

Ernst Cohn-Wiener (1882-1941) and his contribution on Islamic Art and Architecture in Central Asia

Ernst Cohn-Wiener was an unusual wide oriented art historian, whose interests spanned from European and Jewish art, to East Asian and Islamic art and architecture, the latter one is in the focus of this paper. Despite his many contributions in the area of art history he did not get the place he deserved. In the 1920s his interest turned to Islamic Art History and he decided to explore Islamic architecture in Central Asia, a widely unknown field. Two expeditions carried out by him and his wife in 1924 and 1925, resulted in his well-illustrated overview on the Medieval Islamic architecture of Turkestan, published as Turan – Islamische Baukunst in Mittelasien (1930). When he lost his position as a lecturer in 1933 due to the ‘Rassegesetze’ imposed by the ruling Nazis, he emigrated together with his wife via England to India, working for the Maharaja of Baroda until 1939. Their last move was to New York, where Cohn-Wiener died two years later in 1941

Impact of woodburning on air quality

Wood burning stoves and open fires are an increasingly popular form of heating in the UK. In a small proportion of homes they are the main source of heat, but in many households they are a supplementary heat source valued for aesthetic appeal. They are also considered by some to be a greener way of heating the home than the use of fossil fuels (e.g. gas or coal) as wood, when sustainably sourced, can be considered a renewable fuel from a carbon perspective

Beyond Dvořákʼs ‘The Last Renaissance’: on the beginnings of Slovenian scientific art history inspired by modern art

One of the characteristics of the Vienna School of Art History, as Hans Tietze writes in The Method of Art History, is the conviction that ‘living art is the key to dead art’. The article draws connections between the lively art debates in Vienna in the first decade of the twentieth century, the breakthrough of Plečnik’s and Meštrović’s art, and the art historians who, at the beginning of their careers, were just beginning to explore the relationship between the formulation of method and the object of research, and places them in the broader historical context of the situation of small nations just before the dissolution of the monarchy. After the 1914–1918 war, central questions in art and science were reopened at the fringes of the former monarchy. Collaboration between scholars and artists was crucial not only for the development of the professions, but also for the formation of a modern cultural identity and sovereignty in the new multi-ethnic state

Inside haptic Modernism: Alois Riegl and AngloAmerican art criticism and theory

Introduced in 1902 in response to a polemical article by Strzygowski, the category of haptic formulated by Alois Riegl enjoyed a remarkable critical fortune, exquisitely interdisciplinary, throughout the 20th century and beyond. A critical fortune that, not infrequently, has taken the form of a complex and radical reinterpretation of the “optical device” postulated by Riegl, reflecting on the construction of space in Egyptian bas-relief. Since the 1990s, significant new interpretations have been made in the Film Studies field by authors such as Antonia Lant and Noël Burch and, in a more openly subversive, transcultural and gender-based key, by scholars such as Laura U. Marks, Jennifer M. Barker and Giuliana Bruno. Although the research converging in the Film Studies field still needs systematic recognition, this branch of studies is partially known. Otherwise, the adoptions and interpolations this notion has received in contemporary art criticism and historiography still constitute a widely unexplored field. Given this scenario, this contribution aims to trace how the notion of haptic has entered the lexicon of Anglo-American theory and criticism through the modernist period. It will try to record affinities, interpolations, and reinterpretations of the Rieglian model to stress this category’s theoretical malleability and vitality. Through the rediscovery of some forgotten sources, such as Louis Danz’s prodromic study on Picasso Guernica (1937) published in 1941, this study aims at analyzing critically how this notion has been experienced by authors such as Herbert Read and Clement Greenberg, showing how the different genealogies, one aesthesiological and the other psychophysiological (defined by Max Dessoir, Viktor Lowenfeld and Ludwig Münz) intertwined determined two alternative epistemic frameworks. Tracing essays and theories is intended to show how this category has become an eccentric critical tool to disorientate and dismantle the Modernist and Rieglian oculocentric discourses

The artist as historian-politician: Romantic historicism, art, and architecture in the performance of cultural nationalism in Pérez Villaamil and Escosura’s España artística y monumental (1842-50)

This article analyses the sophisticated performance of cultural nationalism in the first instalment of España artística y monumental. It examines how the work’s creators interpreted the Catholic identity of Spain through their political viewpoint aligned with the Partido Moderado, the Spanish liberal conservative party; the process by which they sought to make that identity real, concrete, and persuasive, and the roles of historian, politician, and architect played by the work’s illustrator: painter Genaro Pérez Villaamil. Special attention is paid to the intellectual framework that enabled the project, with a particular focus on the epistemology of Romantic historicism and aesthetics, the understanding of the nation as a civilisation, and the weight assigned to architecture as historical proof. The article also scrutinises the readership experience in order to reveal a potential unusually effective nationalist performance of España artística y monumental in its strategic sequencing of monuments, its interpretation of these monuments through a simultaneously visual and verbal discourse, and the broad dissemination achieved by the work thanks to its printed medium