The Culture Wars of the eighties saw a struggle for dominance between queer rights and conservatism. Campbell considers how prominent artists at the time pursued confrontational thematizations of queerness that destabilized public consensus on sexuality, race, and religion, transforming art into a confrontational political battleground.

Vanni’s painting of The Virgin and Child Appearing to Saint Francis of Assisi guides the viewer through a theatrical ultra-reality showing Saint Francis’s spiritual experience and the beauty of the divine.

Adam discusses the presence of the sciapod within medieval illustrations, examining it in light of St. Augustine’s views on the subject of monstrous races in The City of God and Camille’s modern view of marginal illustrations.

Parsa examines Annibale Carracci’s ceiling frescoes in Palazzo Farnese and argues for a reworking of Gian Pietro Bellori’s Neoplatonic interpretation of early Carracci biographers through the lens of Socrates’ so-called Ladder of Love from Plato’s Symposium.

Adam examines the perceptual relationships between color depictions in the Pre-Raphaelite movement and in the Technicolor and Eastmancolor forms of early color film, focusing on the experiential and the desire to depict the true.

Analyzing how the techniques used in the earliest cave paintings reveal insights into human creative development and form the foundation for later artistic expression.