“We hope to create a platform that will allow scholars and the general public to access data across museums through a simple and visually appealing online interface,” said Laura Auricchio, Ph.D., dean of Fordham College at Lincoln Center, a co-principal investigator for the project.

Several representatives from major museums and libraries, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Library of Congress, were present at an October project workshop at Fordham. Joining them were scholars from Fordham, Harvard University, MIT, the New School, Sciences Po of Paris, and University of Potsdam in Germany. The group has been collaborating continually to produce a final report for the NEH in March, after which they’ll seek additional funding for the project.

Connecting Museums and Their Data

Auricchio said that the project is similar to how museums are connected in the physical realm through the exchange of traveling works of art, but instead of art they would be exchanging research data, or metadata, spawned by their collections. Auricchio distinguished the two data sets by using museum “tombstones” as an example. Tombstones are the placards one sees beside a painting in a museum. The metadata would be the boldfaced information found at the top of the placard: the name of the artists, the years the artist lived, the name of the work of art, and the medium. The research data would be the paragraph below the metadata, which would include more nuanced and detailed information about the painting: its history, influences, and place within art history. Also included in the research data would be essays from exhibition catalogs.

“Only a fraction of a museum’s holdings are photographed for catalogs, the rest is represented through this research data and metadata,” she said.

This new platform would help foster “a new kind of knowledge production for scholars, artists, curators, educators, and an interested public,” she said.

Anne Luther, Ph.D., a co-principal investigator on the project, said that one of the primary challenges is that museums publish their data in silos, and even within institutions the internal databases don’t necessarily follow the same protocol. Luther, along with Auricchio, brought the NEH-funded project to Fordham.

“A museum may have one database system they are using, but from department to department they are using it differently,” Luther said at the October workshop. “The goal is to make this data available as a public good, but at the moment they’re [the data]  not speaking to each other.”

The challenge in dealing with large institutions is that the computer science protocols have already been established, in many cases over the course of years. Luther said there have been long-standing efforts that try to connect museum data internationally, but projects that have tried to impose new standards and new protocols have failed.

“We’re not trying to bring new standards to describing metadata, but rather we want to build, on one side, a protocol that would allow us to connect them,” she said. “We want to allow for the diversity of metadata on object descriptions within the museums to remain the same. We’re not asking the museum to rewrite. We’ll fish that out.”

Speaking the Same Language

Of course, “fishing” for common phases that describe a period, or a work of art, is also one of the great challenges for the project.

Sarah Schwettmann, a graduate student at Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Center for Brains, Minds, and Machines, said a protocol layer that aligns metadata from museums’ digital collections could be the best route.  She noted that with machine learning, which is akin to artificial intelligence, there are increasingly more tools that allow computer scientists to work with and analyze metadata. She said the resulting platform needn’t be a simple search engine or website, but could be something more.

“We could build a protocol that actually asks, ‘Can we compare how different museums talk about items in their collection?’” Schwettmann said at the workshop. “This interface would allow one to interoperate specific terms and cultural language that the various museums have developed over time. This is important because each museum develops bodies of scholarship that are specific to that institution.”

“We want a protocol layer that points back to how individual museums talk about their objects and allows users to interact with and see the diversity in terminology,” she said.

One-Stop Research

Matthew Battles, associate director, metaLAB at Harvard University, noted that today art historians will often need to travel from several galleries, museums, and archives in order to gather the strands of a story about a particular artist, particular genre, and particular period.

“We want to facilitate the research activity of a scholar who wants to tell those stories across an institutional context so that rather than spending five years visiting 25 institutions, they could have access to the data of those various institutions in one place,” he said.

He noted that while diverse institutions feature objects from similar periods in history, they may interpret that history differently. As an example, he noted that all institutions agree there was a Byzantine era, though not all agree on a start date or end date. Where one researcher might want to have a numerically specific date, another might be interested in how various institutions have defined Byzantine.

He said that rather than proposing yet one more system to bring all of the museum systems into alignment, which hasn’t worked anyway, it would be better to provide a “roadmap” of how you can bring the various data into agreement or, if one chooses, eliminate the distinctions.

Battles said the NEH seed money—known as a discovery grant—was key, since the resulting research would be a public good that could impact the way stories are told at exhibitions, in elementary school classrooms, and in higher education, all of which would be “more richly informed by a broader array of resources.”

For decades, Cristóbal de Villalpando’s Adoration of the Magi had been hiding in plain sight at Fordham. This year, it was part of a major show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

When visitors to the Metropolitan Museum of Art took in the exhibition Cristóbal de Villalpando: Mexican Painter of the Baroque from late July to mid-October this year, one of the paintings they likely saw for the first time was The Adoration of the Magi. For more than a century, it had been seen only by visitors to the Fordham president’s office in Cunniffe House.

The 1683 painting depicts the famous scene from the Gospel of Matthew when kings, or magi, visited the infant Jesus. It was given to Fordham during the mid-19th century, shortly after the University’s founding, and likely first put on display at Fordham sometime around 1900.

Villalpando, who lived from 1649 to 1714, emerged in the 1680s as a leading painter in viceregal Mexico and one of the most innovative and accomplished artists in the Spanish art world. During his lifetime, he exported paintings widely throughout Latin America. The Adoration of the Magi, which was based on an early 17th-century engraving of the same title by Peter Paul Rubens, was touted as one of the highlights of the Met show, along with Moses and the Brazen Serpent and the Transfiguration of Jesus, a 28-foot-tall masterpiece Villalpando also painted in 1683.

Ronda Kasl, curator of Latin American art in the American Wing at the Met, said The Adoration of the Magi is significant because it reveals Villalpando’s capacity to envision the divine. “The subject itself is fundamentally concerned with the revelation of divinity. The holy child’s humanity is manifest in his nakedness, while his divinity and his mother’s is revealed in the illumination of their idealized features,” she said.

A Chance Rediscovery

The painting had hung at the Rose Hill campus long before Barbara Mundy, Ph.D., professor of art history and Latin American and Latino studies at Fordham, stumbled upon a mention of it in the University archives while researching several other paintings in the Fordham collection.

“It must have been in 1999 or so,” she said, “when the president’s office asked me to look at four paintings in the council room that somebody thought might be from Latin America. It turns out they were not particularly good or notable paintings, but in doing a little research on them I found mention of a painting by Cristóbal de Villalpando. That intrigued me because he’s an immensely important Mexican painter. He’s like a Michelangelo of Mexico in the 17th century,” she said.

The document she found, an inventory of art at Fordham that was taken during the 1940s, described the Fordham Villalpando as being more than eight feet tall. But when she tried to determine its whereabouts, nobody seemed to have any information—until she mentioned the subject matter.

“That’s when someone said, ‘You know, there’s a big painting of the Epiphany in the president’s office.’ So people understood its imagery and the subject matter, although they had no recognition of the painter himself,” Mundy said. “Of course, Villalpando’s not exactly a household name, so it wasn’t until the Met show that people realized, ‘Oh my gosh, this is really important.’ I almost hit the floor when I first I saw the painting.”

The show, Mundy said, was years in the making. After seeing the Fordham Villalpando, she contacted Clara Bargellini, Ph.D., an academic in Mexico who would go on to serve as a co-curator of the Met exhibit. “We had the painting photographed, and I would bring people in to see it, so word got out about this painting among specialists.”

An Extensive Restoration

Getting The Adoration of the Magi from Rose Hill to the Met was no simple task, however. “The painting was literally nailed into the wall, at least since the 1940s,” Mundy said. So in September 2016, the Met sent a team of specialists to Fordham, and they worked closely with Fordham’s carpenters to make sure the painting could be removed safely, without damaging either the 334-year-old artwork or the wall itself.

Because of its size—78 inches wide and 99 inches high—the painting was Met conservator Dorothy Mahon’s primary focus for nearly 10 months, during which time she traveled to Mexico to see other examples of Villalpando’s work during the same period in his life.

Before she could begin, however, she had to determine how best to proceed. “What’s varnish? And what’s an old paint? It’s a technical examination to be sure that we can separate the original from the later restoration, and that process takes some time,” she said. “Then we began the restoration work: cleaning the picture and cleaning off the old repairs, most of which were terribly discolored.”

Mahon said that the varnish coating the painting had to be delicately removed and replaced, and although the structure of the painting was in good condition when she received it, the backing holding the canvas taut needed to be replaced. “It’s a big picture, so it had lots of varnish and lots of discoloration,” she said, noting that every step of the restoration was painstakingly done by hand with custom-made tools and adhesives.

A Broader Perspective

At a July 24 preview of the Met show for members of the media, Diego Gómez Pickering, consul general of Mexico in New York, said the exhibit could not come at a better time for the estimated 1 million Mexican Americans living in the New York metropolitan area, many of whom, like Villalpando, hail from the state of Puebla.

“The Hispanic community is a founding community of this country. We cannot understand the fabric of American society if we do not mention these important roots,” he said, calling the exhibition “a chance to build … bridges that connect peoples, cultures, societies, and nations.”

Mundy said she’s pleased that the exhibition has called greater public attention to the “extraordinary quality and beauty and richness of Mexican painting.” She said she sees the show as part of a trend in which big U.S. museums are looking beyond traditional subject matter.

“Before, maybe 20 years ago, people thought Europe had it all. But there’s been a growing sense that art history and art heritage doesn’t just come from Europe,” she said. “And this of course reflects the changing demographics in the United States, where more people, American citizens, are coming from Spanish-speaking countries.”

As an example, Mundy cited the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s 2016 show Paint the Revolution: Mexican Modernism, 1910 to 1950, which the museum described as the most comprehensive exhibition of modern Mexican art in the U.S. in 70 years. Mundy was teaching a course on modern Latin American art at Fordham at the time, and she decided to give her students the opportunity to see the show. “We hijacked a Ram Van and went down there on a Saturday,” she said. “This was a class that had a lot of art history majors in it, so they were really jazzed about being able to go.”

One of those students, Peter Vergara, called the exhibition a “cornerstone show for the Latin American art scene as a whole,” and he said seeing it and the Villalpando exhibit at the Met have been formative experiences for him.

“Seeing these enormous exhibits of Latin American and Mexican art in the U.S., and how they are promoting dialogue and cross-cultural interaction between American visitors and Mexican art, and also between Mexican tourists and American cultural centers, is exciting,” he said. “It makes the gaps feel a little smaller.”

Vergara, a Fordham senior who is writing his final seminar research paper on the Fordham Villalpando painting, knows firsthand the value of cross-cultural experiences. He was born in Washington, D.C., but moved with his family to Spain as a toddler when his father took a job in Madrid. He grew up speaking English and Spanish, and spent countless hours at the Prado Museum.

“As a child, I was there all the time. My parents and I would go together in the morning. We would stay for an hour or two, and then they would go to lunch or to see other things, and I would stay for hours,” he said. “My earliest memories are of just lying on the floor of the gallery.”

Vergara moved to the U.S. to attend Portsmouth Abbey School, a Catholic boarding school in Rhode Island, and enrolled at Fordham in 2014. As a first-year student, he developed a passion for art history through two courses in particular, including one on colonization in Latin America, and with support from Mundy and other Fordham professors, landed a string of internships—at the Hispanic Society, the Cloisters, and Sotheby’s.

“I was aware of this world of Latin American art from freshman year, and now it’s shaping where I want to go with my career,” said Vergara, who has applied for a Fulbright study grant to Mexico, where he has been accepted into a master’s degree program at Universidad Iberoamericana.

A Painter and an Inventor

Vergara said his research paper would focus in part on the complex exchange of influences in Villalpando’s art. “While Mexico is heavily tied to Spain through the viceroyalty in Villalpando’s time, how much is European and how much is newer? How much are these artists breaking away and how much are they staying with tradition?”

He’s also focusing on the iconography in the work. “Some of it is very clear,” he said, “like we have wheat on the floor next to Mary and Jesus, and that’s a clear reference to the Eucharist.” But the meaning of other elements in the painting is less clear. For example, he said, “We might have a self-portrait of Villalpando near the back, where he’s looking around the column,” near the figure of Joseph, who is depicted wearing a green robe. “That’s a classic pose for a self-portrait,” he said, and it was common at the time for artists to include themselves in paintings of the Epiphany, to show themselves as “witnesses to the incarnation, among the very first.”

Vergara said that although the painting is “a big, big nod to Rubens,” an argument can be made that Villalpando is also staking a claim not simply as an imitator of the day’s European masters but as an artist in his own right. “He signs this one ‘Villalpando invento ipinto,’” Vergara said. “So he invented and he painted.”

Mundy called the inclusion of The Adoration of the Magi in the Met exhibit a long-overdue recognition for a masterpiece that for many years was hidden in plain sight. She’s especially taken by Villalpando’s ability to “paint the emotion in scenes,” she said. “You can see the response of all of the figures to the Christ child. You can see the awe and the adulation that the magi are feeling, and you can see the wonderful, calm serenity in Mary’s face.

“What’s also fabulous is the big crowd scene behind them,” she added. “Every member of the crowd who is peering in to see the Christ child has their own distinct personality and response to this event.”

—Ryan Stellabotte contributed to this story.

But Michelangelo’s many drawings, and certain derivative works they inspired, also tell a compelling story about his life and the way art and artists were viewed in the 16^th century, says Maria Ruvoldt, PhD, associate professor of art history and a scholar of Italian Renaissance art.

For instance, there was an almost revolutionary idea afoot: that drawings were valuable works of art in themselves, she said. When others created art based on Michelangelo’s drawings, it was treated as if it had been produced by the master himself.

“Any design Michelangelo made, even if it was then executed by another artist, was considered a Michelangelo. It doesn’t matter that it’s not by his hand, because the idea has been reproduced,” Ruvoldt said. “In the 16^th century, value was created in a very different way.”

Michelangelo in Multiple

In the book she’s writing, Michelangelo in Multiple, Ruvoldt views these different conceptions through the lens of drawings that Michelangelo produced as gifts for Tommaso de’Cavalieri, a young nobleman he was infatuated with, as well as other works based on the drawings.

The drawings, ostensibly private, didn’t stay private for long, since they were passed around among Michelangelo’s immediate friends and in fact helped bind that group together. They

wound up generating additional art works that were highly sought-after themselves.

“They circulate within a relatively small circle of people, but almost immediately people outside of that circle are aware of them and want to get their hands on them, and they’re copied at an astonishing rate,” Ruvoldt said. Copies ranged from re-drawings to prints and ceramics to sculptures and paintings for elite patrons.

Michelangelo probably wasn’t surprised that this happened, Ruvoldt said. He was at the height of his fame, and the status of the artist in society was in flux.

“Michelangelo is asserting his autonomy, his ability to make things outside of the traditional client-patron relationship, at a time when people are starting to value the artist as a creative individual and not just as a workman,” she said.

Also in flux was the value of drawings themselves, which were starting to become prized as “residue” of the creative process.

“In a drawing, you can see the artist’s mind at work,” she said. “It’s a transitional moment, really, in the history of the medium of drawings. They start to get collected in this period for the first time.”

The drawings also offered a window into Michelangelo’s personal relationships. With their mythological subjects, they signified different things for different people, depending on how close they were to Michelangelo’s circle of intimates.

“The farther away you get from the immediate relationship, the farther away the images get from their very personal meaning, their very private meaning,” said Ruvoldt. “And they start to be applicable to a broader audience.”

One drawing dwells on the myth of Ganymede, a beautiful prince whom Zeus brings up to Mount Olympus to be his cup bearer, or lover. But the story’s other meaning, as an allegory for the elevation of the soul into heaven, provides cover for a racier interpretation that might prompt speculation about Michelangelo’s relationship with Cavalieri.

“Their meaning is debatable, and mutable,” Ruvoldt said. “If you say, ‘Well, they’re obviously about sex,’ I can say, ‘No, no, it’s an allegorization of the soul.’”

Lack of Copyright

The value created by the drawings was basically up for grabs, given the inchoate state of copyright protections at the time. After Cavalieri surrendered one of Michelangelo’s drawings to the Cardinal Ippolito de’Medici, the cardinal turned around and hired the gem engraver Giovanni Bernardi to make a series of rock-crystal intaglios based on it. “Nobody asks Michelangelo if it’s okay,” Ruvoldt said.

Bernardi then made bronze and lead copies to sell on his own, with his own signature on them. “Now they’re not just Michelangelo’s works, they’re now Michelangelo’s and Bernardi’s, and so they’re doubly valuable,” she said. “Michelangelo doesn’t have any ability to say, ‘Stop doing that.’ And that’s the thing that’s in flux, that idea of what constitutes authorship and what constitutes ownership of the design.”

“Those ideas that, for us, seem kind of settled were not at all settled,” she said.

During the 2014-2015 school year, while conducting research for Michelangelo in Multiple at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art on a Jane and Morgan Whitney Fellowship, Ruvoldt decided to pursue a longstanding idea of hers: teaching a class entirely on-site, at the museum. She taught it for the first time last fall and will be teaching it again this year.

Spending so much time around the objects during the fellowship sharpened her appreciation for being in their presence. She sees this appreciation in her students as well, when they view ancient objects like a Krater—or Greek pot—in person rather than seeing them in a classroom slide presentation or in a textbook.

“They’re just kind of blown away,” she said. “They didn’t know it was so big, they didn’t know they could see the cracks in it and the places where it’s been repaired. That moment, I think, is a kind of ‘aha’ moment for them.”

Eight years ago, Barbara Mundy, Ph.D., associate professor of music and art history, found herself struggling to dig up resources on the colonial period to use in a course on colonial Latin American art.

As an art history scholar who had veered early in her career toward researching the cartography of New Spain (as Mexico was once called), Mundy was doubly aware of the reasons for such thin source material: Nations such as Mexico and Peru, who won their struggle for independence from Spain in the 19th century, wanted little to do with their Spanish heritage.

“The colonial years were looked upon as a time when these nations were in bondage to Spain, so there weren’t a lot of art history resources from the period,” Mundy said. “Nowadays, however, scholars have become more interested in the idea of cultures in contact with each other. Suddenly, the colonial moment in Latin America seems pregnant with possibilities.”

Given the changing scholarly landscape, Mundy and a colleague, Dana Leibsohn, Ph.D., associate professor of art at Smith College, created VISTAS, Visual Culture in Spanish America 1520-1820, a collaborative visual research project that includes a website (www.smith.edu/vistas) and a CD. The VISTAS site houses 350 high-resolution images of Latin American art and visual culture.

In devising the project, Mundy and Leibsohn placed themselves at the forefront of a new paradigm, both in concept and in execution.

“Traditional art history looks at monuments created by elites—sculptures, portraits—and those are what one encounters in museums of art,” Mundy said. “But people have created things, and have paid attention to visual qualities in a whole range of creations—things like a tobacco bag, or a teapot. A big challenge of VISTAS is to not only include the canonical monuments, like the cathedral in Mexico City, but also include objects that reflected the creations of a wider span of people, particularly indigenous people.

“We are broadening the canon so that we don’t look at elite works in isolation,” Mundy said, “but actually view them in dialogue with a much wider sphere of visual products from people from many ranks of society.”

Along with filling a gap in scholarship, Mundy said the VISTAS project seeks to inspire a new approach to scholarly narrative as well. Unlike a textbook, which presents the narrative to a student, the CD and the website enable users to devise their own narrative and to expand on learning styles.

“There are any possible number of paths through VISTAS,” Mundy said. “We’re trained to value the [existing]narrative, but in pedagogy, that’s not actually how we learn. It’s much more effective to explore a topic oneself.”
Mundy’s interest in seeing things from all angles developed early, when she realized, while studying pre-Colombian art, that Aztec civilization was only really known through “hostile sources.”

“I wanted to know, How do you actually find the truth about this culture?” she said.
Mundy started digging through colonial source material. She found a corpus of maps of New Spain, made by both indigenous people and Spaniards, that hadn’t been written about. The result of her study was a book, The Mapping of New Spain: Indigenous Cartography and the Maps of the Relaciones Geográficas (University of Chicago Press, 1996), which explored the notion of a map as a culturally subjective work of art that reveals both geography and a fuller sense of a community’s and a people’s history. To Mundy, reading a map is less about where one is going than where one has been.

“At the time there was an open question as to whether cartography was really a Western phenomenon—partly for lack of evidence of other cartographic traditions,” she said. “So the book was news to a lot of people that there was actually a mapping tradition that existed independently of European mapping. These maps revealed a deep wellspring of traditional indigenous mapping, with a different set of understandings [of the environment].

“Mapping is the result of cultural negotiation,” she said. “In that the final map is not just the product of one artist, but an agreed-upon vision of what the community looks like.”

For Mundy, who is embarking on new research exploring the transition of 16th century Mexico City from the Aztec capital to the Spanish colonial capital, understanding that cultural negotiation in the creation of art is the common thread running through her scholarship.

“The art of this period was not just created by Spaniards alone, although they were culturally dominant, but it was really the result of interchange between this huge indigenous society and the Spaniards,” she said. “And to get at those interchanges, or mergers, is what I work on.”

– Janet Sassi