Category: Research

Paul Mellon Visiting Senior Fellowships, Beinecke Visiting Senior Fellowships, and Leonard A. Lauder Visiting Senior Fellowships support research in the history, theory, and criticism of the visual arts of any period or geographical area.

For the Leonard A. Lauder Visiting Senior Fellowship, we especially encourage applications that contribute to scholarship in understudied areas.

We welcome applications from scholars in any discipline whose work examines art or artifacts or has implications for the analysis, interpretation, and criticism of visual art or visual culture.

Hans Holbein the Younger (1497/8–1543) is renowned as an outstandingly realistic painter—the acme of Renaissance naturalism. In fact, he was a purveyor of cunning ambiguity. Holbein’s Wit: Pictorial Ingenuity in Renaissance Art reveals the artist at play, juggling the uncertainties and paradoxes that arise in the enterprise of imitation. Spanning Holbein’s career in Basel and London, and encompassing his portraits, devotional paintings, and designs for prints and the decorative arts, the book explores this celebrated artist’s subtle pictorial wiles. Holbein was immersed in the multi-faceted world of Renaissance ingenium or ‘wit’, which could mean innate talent, mental acuity, generative capacity, and a person’s unique nature. In dialogue with witty patrons such as Desiderius Erasmus and Thomas More, Holbein advanced an ingenious kind of artmaking characterised by visual jokes, puns, and internal contradictions. Responding to humanism’s literary conceits with an inventive pictorial language, he upended conventional assumptions about naturalism and the status of painting to assert the worth of an autonomous artistic intelligence.

The Burlington Magazine is pleased to announce its ninth annual scholarship to provide funding over a 12-month period to those engaged in the study of French 18th-century fine and decorative art, enabling them to develop new ideas and research that will contribute to this field of art historical study. [...]

Applicants must be studying, or intending to study, for an MA, PhD, post-doctoral or independent research in the field of French 18th-century fine and decorative arts within the 12-month period the funding is given (i.e. September 2026 – August 2027). [...]

£12,000 is awarded to one recipient per year and applies to a 12-month period.

Scientific tests involving artificial intelligence on the paintings conducted by Art Recognition, a Swiss company that collaborates on research with Tilburg University in the Netherlands, has been unable to detect any of Van Eyck’s brushstrokes. It has concluded that the Philadelphia picture was “91% negative” and that the Turin version was “86% negative”.

Till-Holger Borchert, one of the leading Van Eyck scholars and director of the Suermondt-Ludwig-Museum in Aachen, said the Van Eyck findings supported scholars who had suggested that both versions were studio paintings – produced in the artist’s workshop but not necessarily by him.

As far as the eye can perceive: overlooked notes on optics by Kandinsky - By Anne Grasselli

Chasing an altarpiece: two additions to the œuvre of Giuseppe Ghezzi - By Gaia Mazzacane

A ‘Virgin offering flowers to the Child’ by Gian Francesco Penni at Holkham - By Rebekka Segal & Paul Joannides

The enigmatic ‘Roma’ of Urban V (1362–70) in Avignon - By Claudia Bolgia

New documentation for Cardinal Ippolito II d’Este’s ‘Deeds and triumphs of Scipio’ - By Julia van Zandvoort

Pompeii’s new pasts - By Christine Gardner-Dseagu

This book of essays highlights the lives, careers, and works of art of women artists and artisans in Venice and its territories from the fourteenth to the eighteenth centuries. The collection represents the first fruits of an ongoing research program launched by Save Venice, Inc. Women Artists of Venice, directed by Professor Tracy Cooper of Temple University, in conjunction with a conservation program, led by Melissa Conn, Director of Save Venice, Inc. Inspired by a growing body of research that has resurrected female artists and artisans in Florence and Bologna during the last decade, the Save Venice project seeks to recover the history of women artists and artisans born or active in the Venetian republic in the early modern period. Topics include their contemporary reception — or historical silence — and current scholarship positioning them as individuals and as an underrepresented category in the history of art and cultural heritage.

While preparing for an event at the University of Sydney in 2017, a librarian turned to the back page of the library's 1497 copy of Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy and made a curious discovery. In red chalk was a drawing of a woman and baby, and an inscription in Italian:

On the day of 17th September, Giorgione of Castelfranco, a very excellent artist, died of the plague in Venice at the age of 36 and he rests in peace.

This discovery would shine the international art history spotlight on Sydney and begin a project that has seen state-of-the-art imaging techniques used alongside good old-fashioned archival research in a quest for answers.

Was the drawing on the endpaper actually by Giorgione? Was Dante his inspiration? Do we have for the first time the dates of Giorgione's birth and death? How should we reimagine Giorgione's chronology? And how did the early edition of Divine Comedy end up in Sydney?

The collection of Italian paintings at the Yale University Art Gallery is one of the largest and richest in the world. The first of four volumes on the collection, this sumptuously illustrated book features over seventy-five works dating from 1230 to 1420 by artists such as Taddeo Gaddi, Andrea di Cione (better known as Orcagna), Lippo Memmi, Pietro and Ambrogio Lorenzetti, and Lorenzo Monaco. In addition to discussions of each painting’s meaning, function, and significance, entries provide published references, provenance, full technical notes, and detailed conservation histories. An introduction by Laurence Kanter chronicles the history of the collection, from the James Jackson Jarves Collection that was assembled in the nineteenth century—the earliest formed collection of Italian paintings in any American museum—to more recent gifts by Louis and Hannah Rabinowitz and Richard Feigen. While many of the works are from Florence and Siena, the volume also includes examples from Bologna, Rimini, Venice, and more. Through its wide-ranging holdings, the Gallery’s collection provides a remarkable sense of the diverse visual culture of the time.

Single sheet satire – caricature – is one of the most distinctive and original art forms to emerge from England in the eighteenth century. Artists such as James Gillray (1756-1815) and Thomas Rowlandson (1757-1827) combined devastating wit with graphic brilliance to lampoon the great and create timeless images inspired by moments of fleeting controversy or scandal. Availing of a legal loophole, under which copyright law of images did not apply to Ireland, a business of pirating caricatures by London satirists flourished in Regency Dublin. The work of these plagiarists – which is paradoxically inventive and vibrant – as well as prints of Irish subject matter by English caricaturists such as Gillray, is the subject of the book Artists and Pirates: Satirical Prints in Georgian London and Dublin. 

Noble Beasts highlights the work of François Desportes, Jean-Baptiste Oudry, and others who, operating from the heart of institutions such as the Royal Academy and the Gobelins manufactory, produced an astonishing volume of highly accomplished work. The book draws on the critical frameworks of human-animal studies and on Enlightenment philosophical debates to explore how and why hunting art’s aesthetic and political claims blurred the lines between human and animal.

Louvre Abu Dhabi’s Research Programme focuses on transversal areas such as art history, museum studies, collection studies, and heritage science, with the aim of fostering groundbreaking research in collaboration with scholars and institutions, both regionally and globally.

Structured around three thematic axes—Global History of Museums and Collections, Circulation of Styles, Images and Texts and Precious Materials and Routes of Exchange—the programme addresses key topics of art historical scholarship, while also advancing and cooperating with research initiatives beyond the museum’s walls.

At the core of this programme are Louvre Abu Dhabi’s research facilities, which include the museum’s Resource Center, the Library, the Conservation Center, and a Scientific Laboratory allowing for the material analysis of artworks—the first of its kind in the Gulf region. The activities encompassed by the programme include symposiums, workshops, and publications aimed at stimulating dialogue and disseminating knowledge around collections and related themes.

The Anne L. Poulet Curatorial Fellow will have an opportunity to work with curatorial and educational staff on research for permanent collection displays and special exhibitions. Other curatorial training responsibilities include participation in the organization of the annual Symposium on the History of Art, a two-day event co-sponsored with the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University; a lecture series; and the daily administrative routines of a small museum. The Fellow will have a place of study, access to the collections and library, as well as introductions to New York City museums and libraries. Frick curators and conservation staff will be available for consultation on the dissertation. The Fellow will divide his or her time between the completion of the dissertation and activities in the Curatorial Department. The Fellow is considered a full-time temporary exempt employee for the duration of the two-year fellowship. . The term is expected to begin in September 2026 and conclude in August 2028.

The Rijksmuseum × Musée du Louvre Cross-Fellowship Programme welcomes outstanding postdoctoral researchers to submit proposals for research exploring the art and cultural history shared by France and the Netherlands, as reflected in the collections, histories, or institutional contexts of the Musée du Louvre and the Rijksmuseum. [...]

This Fellowship offers early career scholars the opportunity to conduct research into objects in the collections of the Rijksmuseum and the Musée du Louvre. Candidates are invited to submit a research proposal that draws on these objects as subject material and as sources of historical information. The Rijksmuseum × Musée du Louvre Cross-Fellowship is primarily intended for candidates whose focus is on the historical role and symbolic meaning of objects, on material culture or the societal context in which these artefacts were used. Therefore, please note that this fellowship does not welcome proposals exclusively focusing on artistic style, oeuvres or art techniques.

We invite papers that treat frames and framing, broadly conceived, as they relate to drawing. Possible topics and questions that we hope to address include:
– Frame design and drawing for the decorative arts
– The role of frames and framing in the making or changing of meaning
– Inscriptions on drawings or, later, passepartouts, as a form of framing
– Marginalia as paratextual frames
– How the frame in drawing complicates our understanding of the frame
– The frame as mediator of drawings
– The frame as a metapictorial device

This is the final volume of the catalogue raisonné of the drawings by Peter Paul Rubens, covering the years 1621–1640. The project is a collaboration between Anne-Marie Logan, to whom belong all the Rubens attributions, and Kristin Lohse Belkin. It is the first publication that presents the artist’s entire drawn oeuvre in chronological order, previous such publications containing only selections of drawings. Accordingly, Volume III consists of the drawings from 1621 to the artist’s death in 1640.

The first decade is characterized by Rubens’s first foreign commission, the paintings for the Luxembourg Palace, Marie de’ Medici, the Queen Mother’s new residence in Paris, and by the demands of the artist’s diplomatic missions to the courts of Madrid and London. In contrast to the works requested by Rubens’s official duties, especially portraiture, a subject not of primary interest to the artist before, are the paintings and drawings of the second decade, predominantly inspired by the elderly painter’s marriage to the young Helena Fourment and the love and deep affection for his wife and her children. Court portraits are replaced by images of his family à trois crayons, Rubens preferred medium in these years. Helena in disguise appears in the artist’s religious, mythological and genre paintings, most gloriously in the series of drawings for The Garden of Love. Commissions for altarpieces continue but unlike the black chalk anatomical studies of the 1610s, preparatory drawings now consist of head studies in black and red chalk, the latter used for the capture and color of skin. At the same time, images of domestic bliss are accompanied by drawings of the Flemish countryside, especially after Rubens’s purchase of the seignorial estate “Het Steen” in 1635.