Note on the Gephi Visualization:
Below is a model of repeated tropes across the 30 paintings associated with Sight and Song. Poem titles form a ring outside of these repetitions and appear in clockwise order. While Botticelli’s Primavera is the subject of two poems in the volume, we include it only once in our visualization (in its initial position in teh volume). Artist names as well as type of work appear in the next concentric circle, and repeated visual motifs compose the center of the model. Finally, text size as well as the size of the node correlate to the increased number of connections within the graph. The center words and phrases represent what we (Christman, Jarman, Kersh) saw as the most important visual elements repeating across the 30 paintings.
Background:
"The Michael Fields surrounded themselves socially with the greatest creative minds of the fin de siècle. They attended parties with writers like Oscar Wilde and Robert Browning, they visited with artists like Charles Shannon and Charles Ricketts, and they corresponded with major art critics like John Ruskin. Though they were writers first and foremost, the Michael Fields’s commitment to the aesthetic movement and lifestyle led them to cultivate an extensive knowledge of and appreciation for art of all mediums. Visual art was an important part of the fin de siècle cultural moment. The development of mass production during industrialization made it so art could be cheaply reproduced for the first time, making art accessible to more than just the members of highest classes. However, this new, wide distribution of art and decorative goods prompted debate about the new/changing relationship between art and the viewer. John Ruskin’s book Modern Painters (1843) was one of the first and most influential essays on this topic. Several decades after its publication, Ruskin served as a mentor to a young Katharine Bradley. Their relationship occurred at a formative time for Katharine, who was still relatively new to writing, and had a reverberating impact on one half of the future Michael Field.
The Michael Fields’s later personal relationships with Walter Pater and Bernard Berenson, art and culture critics in the vein of Ruskin, continued to foster the poets’ attentiveness to visual as well as textual art. Pater and Bernard, like the Michael Fields, saw a special relationship between visual art and poetry/language and images." -- Kathleen Jarman, '16