About

Leo Costello is an Associate Professor of Art History at Rice University, where he also serves as Chair of the Department of Art History and Co-Director of the Program in Museum and Cultural Heritage. He teaches eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European art, with a focus on British art from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. Prior to joining Rice in Fall 2004, he worked for two years at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. His research includes a significant focus on J.M.W. Turner, with his current book, Early Turner: Seen and Unseen in London, 1795-1819, under contract with Routledge Press, exploring Turner's early career and modernity. Dr. Costello has published extensively on Turner, including his first book, J.M.W. Turner and the Subject of History, and has contributed to major exhibitions and anthologies. His work also encompasses studies of contemporary British photography and broader themes in art history, social theory, and aesthetics.

Research topics

• Art history
• Literature
• Art
• Epistemology
• History
• Philosophy
• Classics

Selected publications

• David H. Solkin. <i>Art in Britain 1660–1815</i>.

  The Scriblerian and the Kit-Cats · 2021

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  • Art history
  • History
  • Classics

  In his introduction to the 1994 edition of Sir Ellis Waterhouse’s Painting in Britain 1530–1790, Michael Kitson noted that in the years since the 1978 revision of the original text from the 1950s, “a revolution has occurred in the study of British art.” Central to that revolution, he goes on to say, was the importation of ideas, methods, and information from disciplinary fields beyond art history itself. Kitson concludes that these changes were so deep-rooted in a difference of approach from Waterhouse’s, that “the only solution to the problem of updating Waterhouse is for a new book to be commissioned from another author.” The present volume, some thirty years later, it stands to reason, seeks to be that solution. Intriguingly, David Solkin, the “other author” in question, was one of the prime driving figures in the very revolution that Kitson describes.At stake, therefore, are not merely the virtues of the present volume alone, which are considerable, but also the very question of a survey of national art, and British art specifically. How, simply put, would one make responsible choices about what to include and how to organize it? However, since one of the critiques of the “revolution” in British art history that Solkin helped bring about was skepticism of overarching narratives, and a preference for studies that favored deeply researched, micro-historical accounts, one might be excused for wondering: why undertake a revision at all?Interestingly, Solkin strikes a decidedly deferential note at the beginning of the book, signaling his intention to remain under the broader aegis of what Waterhouse established. Having invoked J. M. W. Turner’s advice to students to remember always their debt to accomplished predecessors, Solkin claims he too seeks “if not to excel, perhaps, then to provide a worthy successor to the classic text that effectively launched the modern study of historic British art.” Solkin goes on to point out that Waterhouse brought the breadth and complexity of British art powerfully into view: “He revealed a verdant topography where previous observers had perceived a barren wilderness.” He does, however, take the opportunity to provide readers with a narrative of both British art and art history that takes full advantage of the wealth of scholarly writing since the 1978 edition, and from many different approaches, that have transformed and exponentially expanded the field. When Solkin says that Waterhouse’s “outstanding achievement was to forge these fragmentary materials into a magisterial survey that illuminates countless pathways for others to explore,” we may see an implicit justification for the continuation of the project. But the terms and examples that Solkin would establish are, in the end, diametrically opposed to Waterhouse’s, methodologically, theoretically, and, one cannot help but feel, politically (even if many of the artists discussed, as Solkin notes, are the same). In place of the patrician, elitist approach of Waterhouse, whose access to private, often aristocratic collections made his book possible, and who used his acknowledgment to mourn the passing of the national heritage of manor houses, in which art transcends the mundane, Solkin offers an account in which art is fully immersed in a much broader, much more contentious socio-economical world.It is intriguing then that Solkin uses the phrase “worthy successor,” invoking as it does the hereditary language of a bygone aristocratic age in both England and art history, a vestige of which lingers also in the pomp of “magisterial survey.” It is also worth noting, that, his advice notwithstanding, Turner had a tendency, as Solkin well knows, also to place himself in competition with luminaries of the past. While there are continuities in accordance with the Pelican format, including a broadly chronological approach, the use of two-column layout, and a bibliography organized by subject, many substantive changes make Solkin’s difference in approach vividly clear. Where almost every one of Waterhouse’s chapter titles center on a specific ruler or artist, or both, not one of Solkin’s chapters names an individual. Thus “The Age of Van Dyck and Dobson,” becomes “Party, Politics, Portraiture and Print: From the Exclusion Crisis to the ‘Glorious Revolution.’” These alterations match perfectly Solkin’s stated goal to take “the representational fields of class, gender and race as [my] central concerns, in accordance with my long-standing belief that the art historian’s first duty is to produce a critical account of how visual culture has operated within a social field structured by power relationships.”Accordingly, Solkin is not shy about producing strong arguments, either in the overall thrust of the book, or in specific examples. Take, for instance, his discussion of George Stubbs’s depictions of the confrontation of a lion and horse. He acknowledges that Stubbs was encouraged in his ambition to move beyond his role as a sporting painter by cultural elites like Reynolds and Lord Rockingham. But for Solkin, it is as always a wider public that drives pictorial change, so he sees the various versions of Lion Attacking a Horse as being determined by a growing exhibition culture that shifted the focus of subject paintings “away from the exemplary public actions of a pictured protagonist to the viewer’s exemplary private response.” Solkin then convincingly connects the picture to Burke’s contemporaneous theory of the Sublime, mobilized, he says, during the Seven Years’ War “as a means of exercising and hardening the self, and thus of strengthening the body politic.” He acknowledges that it is unlikely this connection would have been present in a conscious way for viewers but concludes that the images’ “enduring popularity attests to the artist’s success in finding a way to captivate the exhibition-going public.”Despite all this, I think even the most conservative reader would have trouble calling Solkin a vulgar Marxist. He writes with a compelling, engaging sensitivity about works of art that would do credit to an art historian of any perspective. He often seamlessly integrates careful scrutiny and description with an openness to the broader cultural implications of aesthetics, as for instance in his account of one of Turner’s seemingly more mundane plates for the Liber Studiorum: “even if its subject matter may not claim to be of biblical importance, the frieze-like frontality of Turner’s design gives the mill an air of poetic dignity that alerts us to its key role in a georgic story.... The irregular surfaces of the mill and the vegetation which obscures its walls speak of an even larger history, recalling centuries of humans working in harmony with nature.” Here close historical attention and social history are not at odds with one another but make for fascinating reading as they mutually enlighten and intertwine.This book, therefore, lives up to its claim of being an invaluable resource for more study. It can be approached by both advanced scholars and more casual readers, and its focus on argumentation opens conversation rather than forestalling it. As with Yale’s art history list generally, it is beautifully designed and lavishly illustrated. In brief, it is a complex, multifaceted, critically alert, and yet still comprehensive work that already suggests yet other possibilities for organizing art surveys.

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• J.M.W. Turner and the Subject of History

  2017-07-05 · 17 citations

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• Power, Creativity, and Destruction in Turner's Fires

  19 Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century · 2017-12-01 · 1 citations

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  This article considers Turner’s depictions of fire throughout his career. Beginning with some of his very first images, including <em>The Pantheon, the Morning after the Fire</em>, it argues that while fire would eventually come to be a means for Turner to create his reputation as a painter of destruction, it also held associations of creativity, domesticity, and comfort. Furthermore, while fire was not nearly as prominent in his early work as it was in the early 1830s, it also became a means for him to elaborate issues of viewership, sublimity, and public space. Following a consideration of some of Turner’s most well-known images of fire in the 1830s, such as those in the <em>Parliament</em> paintings, the article concludes with an extended discussion of the 1832 <em>Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego in the Burning Fiery Furnace</em>. It broadly connects the pictures of the early 1830s to the growth of mass politics and its implications.

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• Air, Science, and Nothing in Wright’s Air Pump

  Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 · 2016-01-01

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  Joseph Wright of Derby’s An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump shows a family arrayed around a pneumatic demonstration. While the picture has been much written about, previous commentators have been inclined to dismiss the experiment that is its ostensible subject, seeing this as merely a pretext for the elaboration of other apparently more pressing issues. I will show, instead, that by understanding the painting within mid-eighteenth-century ideas about air we can gain a more complex sense of its position within the changing aesthetic and scientific discursive fields of the Enlightenment.

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• Leo Costello. Review of "Blacks and Blackness in European Art of the Long Nineteenth Century" by Adrienne L. Childs and Susan H. Libby.

  CAA Reviews · 2016-01-28

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• Portraiture and the Ethics of Alterity: Giacometti vis-à-vis Levinas

  October · 2015-01-01 · 2 citations

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  One of the primary critical investigations around the work of Alberto Giacometti has been his experience of a crisis in representation: the anguished realization of his inability to re-create his perceptions. Indeed, while this crisis came to the fore at various times in his life, it forms the hinge on which his career is taken to turn, because it marked his rejection of the principles of Surrealism. As the oft-repeated story goes, when André Breton heard that Giacometti had returned to study from live models, he scoffed, saying, “Everyone knows what a head looks like.” Breton was right to sense the chasm that separated him from Giacometti, but the latter's reply, that “no one has ever really looked at a face before,” suggests that Breton had failed to grasp the nature of the divide. Giacometti's return to study from life was precipitated by a profound sense of doubt about the most apparently basic artistic transaction, that of looking carefully and representing what he has seen. This skepticism about the very possibility of representation, which was nonetheless coupled with an abiding sense of purpose about the importance of attempting it, was central to Giacometti's approach to the figure. Giacometti knew well that artists before him, Cézanne and Picasso in particular, had shared a similar mix of compulsion and suspicion about representation. Giacometti, however, seems not only to have understood the extent of that dilemma to a degree that his predecessors had not, but to have been compelled by it. In short, the more that doubt seemed to fill Giacometti in the face of the Other, the more urgent the task of trying to represent it became.

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• Britannia’s Palette: The Arts of Naval Victory (review)

  University of Toronto Quarterly · 2009-12-01

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  Reviewed by: Britannia’s Palette: The Arts of Naval Victory Leo Costello (bio) Nicholas Tracy. Britannia’s Palette: The Arts of Naval Victory. McGill-Queen’s University Press. xiv, 476. $75.00 As Nicholas Tracy astutely demonstrates in this volume, naval subjects presented a complex challenge to artists in late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century Britain. On the one hand, painters with any kind of aspirations to high art were required by Academic discourse to transcend the depictions of precise details of nature and history. On the other, the presence of so many sailors in the midst of a well-informed public, eager for details about far-off events, meant that artists were held to rigorous standards of accuracy in the details of ships and actions. As Tracy also notes, the problem is much the same for the historians of these images: art historians often lack the detailed technical nautical knowledge needed to evaluate narrative details, while naval historians are untrained in the close analysis of works of art. Tracy’s book attempts to bridge this disciplinary gap, with mixed success. Though he does not say so, Tracy’s approach is best understood in terms of ‘visual culture.’ By considering the more familiar, large-scale academic paintings by major artists such as J.M.W. Turner and Philippe de Loutherbourg, alongside more traditionally marginalized material like topographical prints and drawings commissioned by the Royal Navy itself, Tracy significantly broadens our understanding of the scope and importance of naval imagery in this period. While the book is structured primarily around discussions of specific battles or events, within these chapters Tracy proceeds by a series of biographical sketches of individual artists. At its best, this approach yields a rich picture of the complex interpenetration of the artistic and naval communities, as well as between the creators, patrons, and audiences for a hugely diverse set of visual materials. Tracy’s citation of a newly sensitive mode of describing the sea in naval publications around the turn of the century, for instance, convincingly introduces another important facet to the development of nineteenth-century naturalism. But Tracy’s clearly stated preference for biography rather than the study of specific pictures also limits the effectiveness of this undertheorized study and places it in uncertain territory within art history. In the first place, given Tracy’s enviable knowledge of nautical history, it is surprising that he declines to engage in extended discussions of the many pictures that are reproduced here. This means that while Tracy’s account produces fascinating sketches of figures such as John Thomas Serres, struggling for a livelihood while caught between the demands of high- and low-art audiences, in cases like Turner’s, where the [End Page 261] biography is much more familiar, the contribution of this study is less clear. Indeed, this, combined with Tracy’s reliance on an outdated idea of Turner as an ‘impressionistic’ painter ahead of his time (the term is used much too loosely here), yields a very standard account of this key figure. Tracy’s organizing principle, of a kind of collective biography of ‘the artists of naval victory,’ also raises as many questions as it answers. While the author often refers to this undefined group as a ‘band of brothers,’ his idea of a collective effort is dependent upon a simplified notion of a less competitive pre-modern art market: ‘Before the invention of photography it was not a winner-take-all world, because there was a tremendous demand for handmade images.’ But Tracy’s own discussions of the struggles of so many of these very same artists to survive reveal the inadequacy of this formation. Thus, one also feels throughout the book that the reactions of contemporary critics and viewers are not mined fully enough for their implications beyond biographical information. William James’s condemnation of Turner’s second picture of the Battle of Trafalgar (1824), for instance, chastises the artist not merely for a want of naval accuracy, but for not finding sufficient ‘pictorial materials’ in Nelson’s sacrifice and concludes by seeking ‘some public-spirited individual’ who might do so. The artist is not caught just between aesthetic poles of accuracy and invention...

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• Leo Costello. Review of "A Rose Has No Teeth: Bruce Nauman in the 1960s" by Constance Lewallen.

  CAA Reviews · 2008-03-04

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• <i>Turner as Draughtsman</i>, by Andrew Wilton

  Victorian Studies · 2007-04-01

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  Reviewed by: Turner as Draughtsman Leo Costello (bio) Turner as Draughtsman, by Andrew Wilton; pp. xii + 167. Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate, 2006, £55.00, $99.95. These days, a volume focused on drawings is likely to be either a catalogue intended for the expert or the connoisseur or a coffee-table book of some attractive watercolors, neither of which is expected to carry much interpretive force. Still less might we expect a book about J. M. W. Turner and drawing to yield significant insight about the artist. Long valued as a masterful painter, Turner's perceived deficiencies in drawing have been cited since his own lifetime. And yet in Turner as Draughtsman, Andrew Wilton seeks, and largely achieves, to make an important contribution to our overall understanding of Turner's work. Indeed, Wilton argues that a complete sense of Turner's accomplishment in painting must include an awareness of the importance of drawing. Wilton notes at the outset that the question of Turner and drawing has been a vexed one. Turner's value to modernism seemed to lie in the proto-abstract quality of some of his late, largely unfinished oils. The apparent irrelevance of drawing in these works distanced him from the discredited academicism that modernism rejected and seemed to presage the painterly, gestural work of someone like Jackson Pollock. In the last twenty years, however, a revisionist account, led by John Gage and Eric Shanes, has rejected this approach as insufficient and stressed a premodern Turner, one concerned with decidedly non-modern issues like academic practice, literary reference, and subject matter. To argue that drawing was important to Turner is to align him with these concerns, and this is the camp into which Wilton firmly places himself. In part, therefore, this is a book that seeks to establish Turner within the artistic milieu of his lifetime, and this Wilton does quite effectively with reference to two periods in particular. The first of these, his apprenticeship and early career in the 1790s, is fairly well-studied already. But by considering the evidence with a focus on Turner's interest and engagement with drawing, Wilton brings together various bits of information that are usually presented in fragmentary form to weave a more nuanced account of the artist's interests and development in these years. His chapter on Turner as a collector of drawings, for instance, offers an important new aspect of his artistic personality. Wilton also situates the role of Turner's sketching within his broader ambitions in these years more comprehensively and subtly than has yet been achieved. He places Turner in relation to a number of masters and contemporaries including Thomas Malton, Philippe de Loutherbourg, Canaletto, Thomas Girtin, and even the caricaturist Thomas Rowlandson. Writing with the easy authority of someone who has spent many years with [End Page 527] Turner's sketchbooks at the Tate, where the vast majority of them are housed, Wilton is able to evoke Turner's incorporation of these influences into a personal style in which drawings became a vital means of negotiating contact with the visible phenomena of the world. Wilton's descriptive language is at its evocative best in places like his discussion of Turner's incorporation of previous models during his Midland Tour of 1794, into a style that recorded both what he saw and also his growing sense of delight in the pervasive life energy of the world around him: "Drawings of Lichfield Cathedral, or a mill near Llangollen, combine indications of both architecture and foliage, where long curved lines, confidently placed on the page, alternate with shorter, scalloped ones and still smaller interlocking curves that evoke the mass of foliage by nestling inside of each other" (64). Wilton gets at the heart not only of Turner's practice, but of the developing nineteenth-century practice of landscape painting as a whole. More unfamiliar, and contentious, is Wilton's discussion of Turner's late-1820s and early-1830s figure paintings in the context of sentimental imagery and poetry being made then for the Annuals, popular periodicals. Here, Wilton argues that what has made many of these pictures seem awkward—then and now—is Turner's failed attempt to bring...

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• Turner’s The Slave Ship (1840) : Towards a Dialectical History Painting

  Palgrave Macmillan UK eBooks · 2004-01-01

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  J. M. W. Turner’s Slavers throwing overboard the Dead and Dying — Typhon coming on, also known simply as The Slave Ship, was first shown in the annual exhibition of the Royal Academy in 1840 (see Figure 13.1). It has since acquired one of the most extensive and colourful critical histories of any of Turner’s paintings.1 As was often his practice, Turner attached a verse-tag, which he wrote himself, to the painting’s entry in the exhibition catalogue. Along with the lengthy title, the verse-tag, to which I shall return below, made the painting’s relevance to the issues of the slave trade and abolition very clear. Exactly how the visual content of The Slave Ship relates to these issues, however, is much less certain. Indeed, since the middle of the last century, a number of scholars have sought specific sources and meanings for the painting’s rather enigmatic imagery. This research has produced a great deal of important information about Turner’s artistic practice and several very sophisticated interpretations, but still the precise nature of Turner’s comment on slavery and abolition remains a matter of debate.

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Awards & honors

• GSA Faculty Teaching and Mentoring Award (2013)
• Individual Faculty Fellowship, Humanities Research Center, R…
• Finalist, Phi Beta Kappa Teaching Award, Rice University (20…