The purpose of this examination is to identify how notions of Swedishness is created artistically, and from where these notions come. My method is to make a study on exhibition catalogues on the theme Swedishness/Nordism, with focus on the contemporary Swedish artist Peter Johansson. With a retrospect of his childhood in Dalecarlia, he investigates a Swedish Iconography with it?s roots in national romanticism, which for more than one hundred years has been preserved and exploited of the tourist industry to market Sweden. It?s this monotonous Iconography that Johansson deconstructs to make it appear like something else ? namely an Iconography based on ethnic purity, which pushes away the foreign and protects the own.

This study is about the artist Monica Sjoo?s (1938-2005) painting God giving birth (1968) that was accused of being blasphemous and obscene in the early 1970s. God giving birth could have had much in common with Niki de Saint-Phalle?s She ? a cathedral (1966), both works suggesting a mother goddess image. The main difference however can be found in the fact that Monica Sjoo?s painting had connection to the women?s movement in the 1970s.

This study is a research on how dystopian features are expressed within different genres. The purpose is to discuss films that contain dystopian features in relation to genre and to examine if there are shared conventions in the films that can make dystopia a film genre on its own. The theoretical base includes genre theory and Rick Altman?s semantic/syntactic approach to film genre. Five films from different genres, all produced within the time period of 2000-2010, are analyzed with a semantic/syntactic approach to genre and then discussed in relation to dystopia and prior research.

Animal art is one of the more mystical aspects of Scandinavian Iron Age culture. It has foremost been regarded in the light of art and style history. Interpretation has also ? mainly from the 1990s and onwards ? been made through iconographic analysis. But the problem here is that Iconography requires textual analogy, something that the Scandinavian Iron Age lacks.The purpose of this paper is to lift some of the ?mystical fog? that engulfs the scandinavian animal art, by developing a method for interpretation of pre-historic images that evades the flaws in the iconographic method.

Syfte med uppsatsen har varit att underso?ka fa?rgens och gestikens pa?verkan pa? altarska?pets iscensa?ttning av bera?ttelserna och da?rmed a?ven budskapet. Uppsatsen har ett bildsemiotiskt perspektiv som en utga?ngspunkt. Materialet fo?r underso?kningen a?r ett flandriskt altarska?p fra?n Ska?nela kyrka som finns idag i Uppsala domkyrka.

Uppsatsen utforskar legenden om den helige Antonius frestelse och det intryck helgonberättelsen lämnat på konsten. En ikonografisk metod används för att beskriva den litteratur som skapat och utvecklat berättelsen och ur detta systematiseras de motiv som sedan översatts till bildkonsten. Genom att analysera nio olika avbildningar av Antonius skapas en kronologisk följd över hur skildringarna genomgått en transformation sedan 1500-talet..

This essay presents an examination of some aspects of an anonymous Italian fifteenth centurypainting, the Madonna in Adoration of the Christ Child with the Young John the Baptist, in theGothenborg Art Museum. My first aim is to understand its symbolic and religious content, and theother is to make an attempt at an attribution, or at least put the work in a likely environment,temporally and geographically. To the first end I analyse the image using Panofsky?s three stagemethod, and then make an iterpretation using the ?period eye? concept of Baxandall, especially froma religious viewpoit. Secondly, I try to define the style of the work mainly by analysing selectedparameters from a large number of fifteenth century Italian pictures found in the photo archive ofthe Federico Zeri Foundation website on the internet.

This study is a research on how dystopian features are expressed within different genres. The purpose is to discuss films that contain dystopian features in relation to genre and to examine if there are shared conventions in the films that can make dystopia a film genre on its own. The theoretical base includes genre theory and Rick Altman?s semantic/syntactic approach to film genre. Five films from different genres, all produced within the time period of 2000-2010, are analyzed with a semantic/syntactic approach to genre and then discussed in relation to dystopia and prior research.

Denna uppsats gör med hjälp av Erwin Panofskys ikonologiska metod en analys av en serie på nitton porträtt av kända 1600-tals män. Dessa porträtt, vilka idag är placerade i biblioteket på Skoklosters slott utreds i sin ikonografi och sätts in i ett större ikonografiskt sammanhang. Porträtten har ett unikt utseende då de är målade på furupannå och sedan kontursågade kring den porträtterades huvud. Avsikten med uppsatsen är att förstå deras syfte och ursprung. Uppsatsen behandlar frågor som varför man har valt att göra dessa porträtt och om det finns en koppling mellan dessa och bibliotekskonst i stort.

This paper investigates the representations of Africans in the Swedish comic press around the time 1880-1920, with the purpose of establishing how Africans were depicted and how these representations can be explained. The sources consist of four comic magazines: Kasper, Söndags-Nisse, Strix and Naggen.Results show that images of Africans in the late 19th and early 20th century Swedish comic press highly conform to international representations. Traditional stereotypes and overall caricatures are widely applied, mediating racial difference and black subordination. The comic strips and jokes can be divided into categories, defined by their main theme: 1) Exotic animals and nature 2) Skin colour 3) The unintelligent or uncivilised savage 4) Cannibalism 5) The civilised African 6) Imperialistic overtones. The use of international stereotypes indicates that some comic strips might have been directly copied from foreign publications, and incorporated into Swedish contexts.Several theories, likely interacting, can be considered in explaining the imagery.

This thesis is intended to review and create a greater understanding for the history and originsof printed scraps from late eighteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth century.A questionnaire survey was sent out to several Swedish museums, containing questionsconcerning their collections, possible exhibits, special difficulties and types of damagesconcerning scraps and their current storage. A visit to the Gothenburg city museum storagewas made to take a closer look at their scrap collection and how they were stored. Thisresearch resulted in an understanding regarding the current situation of printed scraps, whichunfortunately appears to be quite poor and inattentive. These results are presented in the firstchapter.The second chapter describes the history of printed scraps, followed by a chapter presentingrelevant printing techniques and technology. This is followed by various chapters dealing withhow the printed scrap has been used through the ages, history and development of motifs andthe album's significance.

ABSTRACTThe aim of this essay is to analyze and discuss the razors? and tweezers? roles and dualism between them in the Nordic Bronze Age societies. This paper is an attempt to investigate what these little things can tell us about the people that were buried with them. For this purpose I have examined material of burial that consist of finds of razors respective tweezers and their connection with artefacts in the graves. I have done a comparative and contextual study together using quantitative and qualitative methods to investigate their roles and dualism.

The capricious roman goddess Fortune is known for her strong power to influence or even decide the destiny of humans. In ancient Rome she was considered to be a good goddess, who brought the gifts of destiny and who also was seen as a possible ally. During the Middle Ages this position changed. Fortune was given two sides, a good and friendly one and a cruel impenetrable side. She was seen as one of God´s ministers and became an expression of divine providence.My purpose with this essay is to analyse three artworks of Fortune by Giovanni Bellini, Albrecht Dürer and Master MZ, but also some texts by the renaissance humanist Niccolò Machiavelli.

The connection between rune stones and churches is a known phenomenon. Unfortunately, very little is known about the previous function of the church sites, and consequently very little is known about what the connection between rune stones and churches means. The purpose of this study is to examine the rune stones connected to churches in the administrative province of Jönköping, in an effort to ascertain their purpose, symbolism and function. The aim is to find out if the rune stones connected to churches were primarily or secondarily placed on the site where the church was later built, and why some rune stones were built into the churches. Further, the inscriptions and Iconography of rune stones have been analysed, and also their relation to their immediate surroundings.