Function and Aesthetic Value: an Analysis of the Milwaukee Public Museum\u27s Thai Royal Silver Collection

This thesis analyzes 45 objects from the Thai Royal Silver collection currently housed at the Milwaukee Public Museum (MPM). Of these, 41 were donated by a single donor, Dr. Louis Schapiro, who collected the objects during his time working as Medical Advisor for the King of Siam in 1931-1932. Following his death, his son Mark held onto the objects until 1969, when they became a part of the MPM’s collection. The chosen objects include boxes, bowls, and other types of vessels. Through researching this collection, the following questions guided the direction for this thesis: How did the silver industry begin in Siam (Thailand) and how has it evolved throughout the years? How and why are certain decorative and symbolic motifs used on Thai silver vessels? Where did the motifs originate and how have they evolved? Through object analysis, the creation of an object biography and inventory (including photography), reaching out to institutions and anthropologists for additional information, and researching past and present changes to the industry, these methods helped to provide context and conclusions for the stated thesis questions. Silver from Thailand remains an elusive topic within both anthropology and art history lenses. The royal courts commissioned silversmiths to create exclusive goods in exchange for housing and all other necessities. Little is known about the history of the industry, gift giving practices, and purpose of the objects created. Each of the aesthetic motifs studied here provide different meanings for the objects, most of which pertain to fertility, wealth, health, or luck. Many of the objects provided different functions throughout their object lives, from useable items to keepsakes or status symbols. Others served exclusively religious functions. It is the aim of this paper to provide conclusions that will help to facilitate further knowledge and interest in the broader Thai silver history, industry, and practice

Pious Labor: Islam, Artisanship, and Technology in Colonial India

Contents: 1. Lithographic labor : locating Muslim artisans in the print economy -- 2. Electroplating as alchemy : labor and technology among Muslim metalsmiths -- 3. Sewing with Idris : artisan knowledge and community history -- 4. Migrant carpenters, migrant Muslims : religious and technical knowledge in motion -- 5. The steam engine as a Muslim technology : boilermaking and artisan Islam -- 6. Building the modern mosque : stonemasonry as religion and labor.In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, working-class people across northern India found themselves negotiating rapid industrial change, emerging technologies, and class hierarchies. In response to these massive changes, Indian Muslim artisans began to publicly assert the deep relation between their religion and their labor, using the increasingly accessible popular press to redefine Islamic traditions "from below." Centering the stories and experiences of metalsmiths, stonemasons, tailors, press workers, and carpenters, Pious Labor tells the story of colonial-era social changes through the perspectives of the workers themselves. As Amanda Lanzillo shows, the colonial marginalization of these artisans is intimately linked with the continued exclusion of laboring voices today. By drawing on previously unstudied Urdu-language technical manuals and community histories, Lanzillo highlights not only the materiality of artisanal production but also the cultural agency of artisanal producers, filling in a major gap in South Asian history"-- Provided by publisher.Islamic Humanities series, University of California Press

Pu-abi's Adornment for the Afterlife: Materials and Technologies of Jewelry at Ur in Mesopotamia

This dissertation investigates one of the most important archaeological discoveries of the 20th century - the jewelry belonging to a female named Pu-abi buried in the so-called Royal Cemetery at the site of Ur in southern Mesopotamia, modern Iraq. The mid-third millennium B.C. assemblage represents one of the earliest and richest extant collections of gold and precious stones from antiquity and figures as one of the most renowned and often illustrated aspects of Sumerian culture. With a few notable exceptions most scholars have interpreted these jewels primarily as a reflection in burial of a significant level of power and prestige among the ruling kings and queens of Ur at the time. While the jewelry certainly could, and undoubtedly did, reflect the identity and status of the deceased, I believe that it might have acted as much more than a mere marker and that the identity and status thus signaled might have had a considerably more nuanced meaning, or even a different one, than that of royalty or royalty alone. Based on a thorough examination of the materials and methods used to manufacture these ornaments, I will argue that the jewelry was not simply a rich but passive collection of prestige goods, rather that jewelry that can be read in terms of active ritual, and perhaps cultic, production and display. The particular materials and techniques chosen for the making of Pu-abi's jewelry entailed methodological operations akin to what Alfred Gell has called the "technology of enchantment and enchantment of technology" and allowed these ornaments to materialize from their creation as a group of magically and ritually charged objects

Nature's objects : geology, aesthetics, and the understanding of materiality in eighteenth-century Britain and France

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Architecture, 2012.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (p. 353-390).Explorations of aesthetic design and scientific experimentation have traditionally relied upon the natural world as a source of inspiration. Notably absent from previous studies of the eighteenth century is the dynamic connections between contrasting disciplines of this time period. Terrestrial objects such as diamonds, silver, gold, and stone, situated between architecture, the decorative arts, and geology, superseded classical models of Aristotelian emulation, which privileged original visual forms. They evoked newfound tensions between modalities of intuition and empirical observation, providing alternate paradigms of nature based upon firsthand experience. This dissertation takes up an extensive assembly of historical actors who analyzed these objects - architects, artisans, chemists, collectors, engravers, geologists, jewelers, and silversmiths. Late Enlightenment designers Robert Adam, William Chambers, and Batty Langley as well as intellectuals Denis Diderot and Louis Dutens explored some of the same materials that piqued the curiosity of silversmiths Pierre-Simon Augustin Dupre, Francois-Thomas Germain, and Jacques Roettiers. Artisan Pierre de Fontanieu and chemists Antoine Laurent de Lavoisier and Jean-Louis Baptiste Rome de l'Isle also problematized the aesthetic usages of these objects, arriving at differing conclusions. Pervasive debates throughout Europe attempted to determine the quotient of hardness in minerals, plasticity of metal, or durability of stone. These provocative cross-currents between the domains of the arts, sciences, and politics generated remarkable insight into these objects taken from the earth; in turn, these intersections shaped a unique conception of materiality, which anticipated untapped potential for architectural styles, artistic production, and geological determination. Mining and related images of the subterranean - mineralogical atlases, etchings of rock formations, maps of sedimentary deposits, imagined grottos, and utopian architecture - are framed as part of a geological imaginary, a contributor to modernism's early inheritance. The first chapter contemplates how the cutting of diamonds as raw stones cultivated attitudes towards jewelry settings, formulas for false gemstones, and chemical demonstrations. Artisans judged a diamond's functional and authentic attributes in order to craft acceptable imitations. In focusing upon silver and gold, the second chapter traces the material transformations of valuable metals from decorative ornament into commemorative coins and medals during the French Revolution. Fiscal currency circulated as economic signifiers that embodied human values superimposed onto natural resources. The third chapter examines several types of stone from limestone, granite, to marble demonstrating how their visual and structural properties became articulated through Gothic revival practices in Georgian England. Antiquarian and genealogical discourses not only influenced conceptions of stone as a building material, but they also focused upon geological explanations as a mutual foundation of comprehension. The conclusion merges the mythological stories behind these objects with their historical narratives, elucidating why cultural misinterpretations are as important as factual evidence. Derived from corporeal perception and abstract theorization, materiality revealed unknown dimensions of these prosaic objects, whose telluric origins became recast as both ancient and modem.Ph.D

The gilded Buddha - The traditional art of the Newar metal casters in Nepal

This book celebrates in words and images the traditional metal crafts practised for over a thousand years by the creators of religious Buddhist statues in Nepal. The skills of these artisans are nurtured with deep respect for tradition, regarding religion, iconography and technology. Wax modellers, mould makers, casters, fire-gilders and chasers are among the specialists of the Newar ethnic group, whose work is characterised to this day by a melding of age-old technology, great skill, religious observance and contemplation. There are numerous books and exhibition catalogues dedicated to Buddhist art and iconography but little was available about the craft of the artists who turn the religious imagery into metal casts. This book fills this gap, with a thoroughly documented and historical account of the development of this “archaic” technology. The well-informed text and comprehensive photographic coverage constitute the only up-to-date account and full documentation of an art that is 1300 years old but dying out: the “ritual” production of Buddhist statues in the lost wax casting technique. The author, Dr. Alex Furger, is an archaeologist who has studied ancient metallurgy and metalworking techniques over the past four decades. He spent twenty-five years at the head of the Roman site of Augusta Raurica and lives in Basel (Switzerland). He is the author of over 130 articles in scientific journals and twelve books in the field of culture history. The fieldwork for this book led him repeatedly to Nepal, where he met and interviewed dozens of craftsmen in their workshops. This book is addressed to readers interested in culture history, travellers to Asia, collectors of statues of Buddha, (avocational) metalworkers, historians of technology, Buddhists, ethnologists, archaeologists, art historians, scholars of Asia and to libraries and museums

THE ARTĚL COOPERATIVE (1908-1934): CRAFTING CZECH MODERNITY

Eight founding members of Artěl—the Prague avant-garde’s response to the Wiener Werkstätte—united in 1908 with a manifesto proclaiming their goals to combat inferior factory substitutes for handcrafted designs and to restore society with a sense of taste through affordable products for everyday life. Across Artěl’s stylistic, political, and ideological development, its members consistently demonstrated the complementary relationship between the folk and the modern. Whether working in the Czech variant of Cubism in the final years of the Habsburg Dual Monarchy, the folk-infused nationalist “decorativism” of the First Czechoslovak Republic after 1918, or the sober Functionalism of the late 1920s, Artěl designers struck an aesthetic balance between regional Czech folk arts and international avant-garde styles. The group thereby served to construct and promote a distinctively Czech visual culture for the international stage at a transformative moment in Czech history

Late Antique, migration period and Early Byzantine garnet cloisonné ornaments: Origins, styles and workshop production

The thesis proposes a classification of gold and garnet cloisonné ornaments based on stylistic and technological features. These objects reflect Late Antique/Early Byzantine decorative and manufacturing traditions. Flat garnet plates originate with one class of ring-stone intaglios from the Late Hellenistic and Imperial Roman periods. Garnet plates were first set on jewellery at this same time Early inlaid ornaments are characterised by a mixture of western and eastern elements shared along the eastern trade routes. The first examples of true garnet cloisonné are preserved in Western Asia and Soviet Georgia (ancient Iberia). Although excavated with coins, accurate dating of the latter finds remains difficult. Some objects may be as early as the late third century while others parallel ornaments in southern Russia and Europe which are datable to the late fourth and fifth centuries' AD. Cloisonné ornaments at Kerch in the Crimea incorporate standardised geometric plate shapes. These preserve Graeco-Roman traditions of decoration and lapidary technology, and may have been produced under official Roman auspices. Ornaments on both sides of the Pontus, therefore, reflect the range of Late Antique cloisonné production. Standardised plates, sometimes set with cabochon bars in proportional patterns, characterise sword fittings deposited in Hunnic Period contexts. Their distribution reflects burial customs, as the garnet cloisonné mounts themselves represent Late Antique/Farly Byzantine traditions. These official or urban styles stimulated a range of regional imitations. One group of cloisonné ornaments, Christian in character and worn predominantly by women, replicates classical mosaic floor patterns. These share features with other examples of Early Byzantine jewellery produced in urban centres for both barbarian and Roman clients. In the second half of the fifth century, a contemporary style appears on male weaponry and horse harness preserved in contexts which suggest their owners held official positions in the Early Byzantine militia. The mixture of barbarian and Roman elements within this style characterises Early Byzantine cloisonné from sixth-century European and Mediterranean contexts

Lemba, 1650-1930: A Drum of Affliction in Africa and the New World

©1982 John M. Janzen. The contents of this monograph have been divided into five files for easier downloading. Readers on faster internet connections may prefer to download the entire book in one 70 MB file. It is being made available in both formats

Mourning jewellery in England, c.1500-1800

PhD Thesis Images have been removed from electronic copy due to copyright issues. The images are included in the print version of this thesis which can be requested via the library catalogueThis thesis explores the historical importance and social function of memorial jewellery within the funerary and mourning cultures of early modern England. Mourning jewellery represented a particularly distinctive facet of mourning and funerary ritual and etiquette, and this study reveals the customary role which mourning jewellery grew to occupy, as a method for the memorialisation and commemoration of the dead, over the course of three centuries, c.1500- 1800. The thesis introduces and defines the broad parameters of the primary research, with a discussion of the source materials employed, including the creation of a database which analysed a large body of wills from Essex, Middlesex, and Surrey, as a means of understanding the place which mourning jewellery occupied within the funerary and remembrance strategies of early modern testators. Beginning with the material objects themselves, the following two chapters provide a chronological overview of the jewellery itself, looking at what kinds of pieces were actually being produced and utilised, introducing form and fashions, and detailing evolving stylistic modes, conventions, and decorative motifs. Placing these material markers within their proper social, cultural, and economic contexts offers a greater understanding of the customary function of mourning jewellery as a whole and the ways in which it was bequeathed and utilised as a means of mourning and commemorating the dead. The fourth chapter offers an insight into the types of people who were typically giving and receiving mourning jewellery, and how the processes, functions, and relationships, which lay behind these exchanges, actually worked in practice. The fifth chapter assesses the overall significance and widespread popular impact of mourning jewellery as a whole, both socially and over time, within the funerary provisions and customary remembrance strategies of testators and the bereaved. The role, significance, and import of mourning jewellery fluctuated according to its employment; it lay within an intricate web of attachments and obligations, ritual and observance, mourning and memory. The final part of the thesis ends by providing some insight into this process, looking at the ways in which mourning jewellery was used in practice and the prospective lifecycle of such objects. It also deals with thornier issues surrounding contemporary emotional responses towards death and loss, observing how mourning jewellery operated, why it was used, and whether it could provide any comfort for the bereaved.AHR