During the 20th century, several major but importantly distinct art historians incorporated Pragmatist philosophy into their scholarship: Bernard Berenson (1865-1959), Edgar Wind (1900-1971), and Meyer Schapiro (1904-1996). The Pragmatist bases of their interpretations are documented and described—especially in relation to the pragmatic maxim—and their arguments are analyzed and evaluated against the modes of art historical research in which they each worked: formalism, iconology, social history, and semiotics. Chapter one focuses on how Berenson appropriated and transformed ideas found in the Pragmatist psychology of William James (1842-1910) to create and justify his influential yet much maligned formalist art history. I focus on Berenson’s interpretation of Giotto’s naturalism—a key example for his theory of “tactile values”—and I contrast Berenson’s interpretation to that of his formalist peer, Alois Riegl (1858-1905), in order further to differentiate Berenson’s Pragmatist commitments. Chapter two focuses on Edgar Wind’s often-overlooked approach to iconology, framing Wind’s project in relation to his confessed indebtedness to the philosophy of science of Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914). Wind’s Habilitation itself is a Pragmatist contribution to the philosophy of science, and to help clarify how that early work informed his later art history I contrast Wind’s interpretation of Titian’s Venus Blinding Cupid to that of Erwin Panofsky (1892-1968), thereby using Panofsky’s classic iconological platform as a baseline against which to throw Wind’s Pragmatist commitments into relief. Chapter three focuses on what I call Meyer Schapiro’s postwar psycho-social arguments. Here I analyze Schapiro’s claims about Vincent van Gogh and Paul Cézanne, and how these claims differ from more orthodox Marxist and psychoanalytic interpretations, especially those of Arnold Hauser (1892-1978). Even though Schapiro was deeply informed by the writings of both Karl Marx (1818-1883) and Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), he was also indebted to the Pragmatist aesthetics and psychology of John Dewey (1859-1952) and George Herbert Mead (1863-1931), whose Pragmatist arguments help unpack the distinctive quality of Schapiro’s claims. Chapter four again focuses on Schapiro—this time on his later semiotic writing and how those arguments are both indebted to the tripartite semiotics of Peirce and different from the structuralist claims of Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908-2009). In this chapter I draw on some of Schapiro’s unpublished lectures on semiotics and show that his claims in his book Words and Pictures are made largely in a Pragmatist mode. I conclude by noting some analytic parallels between the neo-Pragmatist thinking of Richard Rorty (1931-2007) and one of the most ambitious contributions to art historical scholarship in recent years: David Summers’s Real Spaces: World Art History and the Rise of Western Modernism. Summers himself (born 1941) has described Real Spaces in openly Rortyean terms, and in my epilogue I analyze both the potential and the challenges that such an adaptation of Pragmatism poses for art history today.

This dissertation explores the drawings of a fourteenth-century Italian priest, Opicinus de Canistris, who is emerging as a critical figure for medieval art history. His drawings contradict numerous assumptions of how scientific curiosity, space, allegory, gender and humor operated in medieval visual culture. Opicinus combined maps with human bodies to create complex allegories of the natural and spiritual world. These drawings defy traditional art-historical classification; they relate closely to contemporary maps and sea-charts, religious pictorial imagery, medical drawings, and cosmological diagrams, but belong to none of these categories. This study examines his drawings in relation to medieval epistemology, science, cartography, allegory, and gender, as well as modern theoretical approaches to mapping and the diagrammatic mode.

This study also explores Opicinus's process of experimentation and making. To gain a greater understanding of what Opicinus was trying to convey through the creation of embodied maps, the maps, themselves, are explored first - their empirical basis, conditions of use, geometric techniques, and visual qualities - seeking what it was in them that so fascinated Opicinus. The next chapter explores vision and allegory in the drawings, probing the interactions between cartographic form and theological content that created his meanings. The third chapter questions the relationship between Opicinus's body-world drawings and contemporary conceptions and pictures of cosmic relationships and their relation to the body, and the final section examines how Opicinus used gender binaries and graphic sexuality as structural devices and metaphors.

This dissertation explores the relationship between pictures and the lighting conditions in which they were originally viewed. Using advanced rendering technology, I reconstruct the original architectural context in which a work of art was displayed and simulate the effects of variable daylight and artificial illumination on the picture's appearance. This research methodology enables me to describe the interaction between real lighting and depicted lighting relative to the picture's symbolic content. I provide a typology of these interactions (which I call "pictorialized illumination") using examples from diverse art historical traditions. In the final chapters, I analyze two case studies: Leonardo da Vinci's Last Supper at the refectory of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan, and Peter Paul Rubens's altarpiece for the church of Santa Maria in Vallicella in Rome.