This essay works within a transatlantic framework to excavate an early modern sensitivity to form and formal arrangement from practices of compositionally reconfiguring printed compositions. Tracing such operations generates a reappraisal of foundational conceptions of Baroque aesthetics and of the very notion of the Baroque as a style. The essay begins in colonial Latin America, where artists were frequently tasked with using European prints to produce works of art, but it then tacks in the opposite direction to argue that exploring Latin American compositional modes allows better seeing them in Europe as well – both in commonplace visual culture and in the highest echelons of artistic production. The Baroque comes to be defined as a compositional mode of artistic practice centered on form and its potential for syntactical recombination – a mode conditioned by the medium of print. This essay thus advocates for the ways that working across once-interconnected geographies can (and should) shift key historiographic concepts and aesthetic frameworks: here of Baroque compositional practice, the Baroque as a historiographic construct, and print’s unmined place within both.

The famous broadsheet Inhalt zweierley predig (1529) is considered as one of the prime examples of ‘protestant propaganda’. Unfortunately, this interpretation of the woodcut with two preaching scenes and the text written by Hans Sachs fails to recognize the complexity of the print. On the basis of a thorough analysis of the manipulative pictorial elements, its proximity to depictions of disputatio scenes and its use with hearing the texts being read aloud and looking at the image publicly, the broadsheet is presented here as a didactic tool, intentionally comparable to the audio-visual perception also addressed in preaching, the topic of the woodcut. This contribution intends to emphasize the intermedial and intersensory instruments in the social history of ideas.

In the 1920s the quattrocento Italian painter Paolo Uccello was appropriated as a precursor of Surrealism in the French surrealist discourse, a process that continued and became international in the 1930s. The (positive) reception of Uccello among avant-gardes such as Surrealism was distinctly different from his contemporaneous (rather negative) reception among art historians. In several places the surrealist perception of the artist prefigures post-modern views, not least when it comes to Uccello’s playful and experimental attitude to perspective. The standard was set by the surrealist poet Philippe Soupault in 1929 in an art historical treatise inspired upon a surrealist worldview. Reviewing this and other written sources, this article also briefly discusses three examples of artistic responses to Uccellan aesthetics, by Salvador Dalí, George Hugnet and René Magritte.

While many businesses continue to endure hardships as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic and “sheltering in place” in some places becomes obsolete, the significance of what we do and wear at home remains as important to our health and safety as what we do at work, in public spaces, and in social life. In hopes of lasting commitments to conscious lifestyle choices, this article analyzes the culture of pajama wearing in the early twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Drawing from diverse sources ranging from The Metropolitan Museum of Art to independent news media outlets, the article illustrates, despite sleepwear’s association with comfort and ease, how the history of the garment is instead steeped in narratives of colonialism, slave labor, and the hazards of the modern chemical industry. By weaving diverse sources and histories, baggy and loose-fitting pajamas are re-positioned as an understudied fashion garment that now plays a