Category: Research

This article explores the relationship between skin, materiality and medicine in the early modern German-speaking lands. It focuses on the understudied artwork of the Munich-born artist Johann Rottenhammer (1564–1625), demonstrating that his painted bodies were related to medical understandings of skin. Skin was a mediating boundary between inside and outside: the colour and texture of skin carried meanings about the internal state of the body. In this period, ‘exploration’ beyond Europe was destabilizing the definition of ‘good’ or ‘normative’ skin. The appearance of healthy or unhealthy skin was expressed in contemporary northern European artistic theory, for example in Karel van Mander’s Book on Painting. This article contributes to the growing literature on materiality and medicine by demonstrating their indelible impact on the artist’s project. Medical histories of the sixteenth century have traditionally positioned the Galenic and Paracelsian medical traditions as diametrically opposed. This article observes, however, key areas of similarity—the origin of curative materials, and the relationship between the internal body and the external natural world—and considers how they were present in early modern German understandings of skin.

The Government of Flanders is pleased to announce funding for the first year of a 3 year new collaboration in the field of art history between the Rubenshuis in Antwerp and Trinity Hall at the University of Cambridge. This partnership will further strengthen the bonds between our institutions and promote a deeper understanding of our shared cultural heritage. The substantial funding supports the study of Renaissance and Early Modern Flemish Art in the form of research workshops, visiting postdoctoral researchers, visiting postgraduate students, lectures by senior scholars, and summer schools in Antwerp and Cambridge.

The collaboration, which commences in August 2024, will be led by Dr. Bert Watteeuw, Director of the Rubenshuis, and Prof. Alexander Marr, Professor of Renaissance and Early Modern Art; Fellow, Trinity Hall; and incoming Head of the Department of History of Art, Cambridge. The programme of work will be co-ordinated by Drs. Justin Davies, Fellow Commoner at Trinity Hall and Visiting Fellow of the Rubenshuis.

- Drive the strategy for the Restitution Department Globally, managing the team.
- Oversee and direct workflow of Sotheby’s Global Restitution department’s research to prevent stolen objects from circulating in the art market and, in particular, resolving provenance issues of any item with ownership claims from the Nazi-era.
- Collaborate with business getters and cataloguers in each affected expert department to vet and research artworks being appraised, prospected or sold.
- Provide guidance and training to art specialists and other colleagues at Sotheby’s on policies surrounding stolen art and objects with Nazi-era provenance.
- Represent Sotheby’s and Sotheby’s Restitution as an ambassador at events including lectures and conferences globally.
- Organize Sotheby’s hosted events and educational seminars focusing on the nuances and scholarship in this area.
- Develop and maintain relationships with relevant lawyers, researchers and government bodies in the restitution field.
- Generate incremental business through research and contacts, specifically lawyers, heirs, museums and researchers.
- Publish articles in relevant magazines and be a recognised expert in the field.
- Work directly with clients and their advisors to navigate and resolve claims.
- Facilitate settlements between consignors and claimants and lead any sale claims management.
- Partner with colleagues to oversee compliance around source of funds.
- Act as a member of the Sotheby’s Ethics Committee.

o   Executing due diligence checks on consigned property; including cross-referencing databases, maintaining record, checking archives and library work
o   Supporting and executing in-depth research into collectors, collections and objects to support future sales and claims discussions, as needed and directed
o   Researching and inputting into restitution databases; maintaining integrity of information
o   Assisting in preparation of client facing materials, management reports as directed
o   Maintaining departmental library and materials
o   Contributing to training programs

The ‘Balbi’ children identified: a proposal - BY GREGORY MARTIN,ANNA ORLANDO

A reverse-glass painting by Gerhard Janssen in the Valtice Palace - BY ZDEŇKA MÍCHALOVÁ,ZUZANA MACUROVÁ

‘The abduction of Europa’ by Paulus Potter: a mythological painting rediscovered - BY JOLIJN SCHILDER,MUIRNE LYDON,LIZZIE MARX,NATALIA MACRO,ABBIE VANDIVERE

The oculi of Notre-Dame, Paris - BY ARNAUD YBERT,BRUNO PHALIP,DYLAN NOUZERAN

Charles XV’s ‘Norwegian landscape’ in the Museum Gustavianum, Uppsala - BY EVA-CHARLOTTA MEBIUS

The earliest documented work of Marinus van Reymerswale - BY MANUEL PARADA LÓPEZ DE CORSELAS,CHRISTINE SEIDEL

The missing woman: the reunion of a family portrait by Cornelis de Vos -BY ANGELA JAGER,JØRGEN WADUM

A history painting by Willem van der Vliet - BY TOMMASO BORGOGELLI

This interdisciplinary convention invites colleagues working on all aspects of thirteenth-century painting, from art-historical studies to scientific analysis, technical research and conservation. The conference aims to provide an exceptional opportunity to share and discuss the artworks of Margarito d'Arezzo and his contemporaries.

Submissions covering a wide range of topics will be considered, including works on panel, sculptures, wall paintings, textiles, and miniatures, as well as art history and the history of collecting. We expect that the conference will stimulate studies in this area, so proposals may also include information on ongoing research, without detailed results.

The author has put together seventy-seven autograph paintings, some of which are presented for the first time on this occasion, others already recognized to Cecco by the writer during her long years of study of seventeenth-century Florentine painting, ordering them chronologically by stylistic induction and through comparison with the very notable and more documented production in fresco.

Even more meritorious is the feat of gathering nearly four hundred of the artist’s drawings scattered in major museums around the world and in the most prestigious private collections, reproduced almost entirely in color.

The core of this parlance is, of course, the eponymous 12 steps in the book’s title. A section of the book breaks down each step into its core principle, and then illustrates it through works of art and literature. Step One, summarized as “Admit Powerlessness,” is paired with “Despair” (1894) by Edvard Munch, “Snow Storm – Steam-Boat off a Harbour’s Mouth” (1842) by J. M. W. Turner, “Sueño” (1992) by Kiki Smith, and even a Ptolemaic relief dating to 332 BCE from the Temple of Haroeris and Sobek in the Nile Valley of Egypt. Each captures the devastation, confusion, and tumult of a losing battle with alcoholism and other related diseases — one that drives millions of people to reach out for help.

The Radical Print argues for printmaking in Britain as the most exciting, innovative, and critically engaged field of artistic production in the late eighteenth century. Moving the print from the margins to the centre of the study of art history, this new critical study demonstrates how print responded to the acceleration of historical events, the polarisation of public discourse, and the sense of a world turned upside down in ways that traditional artistic media could not.

Across five chapters, this book brings printmakers James Barry, John Hamilton Mortimer, James Gillray, Thomas Bewick, and William Blake together as artists of the “Paper Age” for the first time. From Barry’s experiments in aquatint at the time of the American Revolution to Blake’s visionary engravings of the post-Napoleonic period, Chadwick shows how the print medium provided artists with special purchase on the major political issues of their age.

“Hardly more than a shadow”: Apropos Drawings by Antonio Palma in the Louvre - Lily Mathelin

Getting to Color: Early Pastel Drawings by Federico Barocci - Luca Baroni

An Introduction to the Life and Drawings of Robert van den Hoecke - Tom Nevile

Six New Drawings by Nicolas Lancret at the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Dijon - Axel Moulinier

Giambattista Tiepolo’s “Scalzi-style” Drawings Reconsidered: New Proposals for the Würzburg Residenz and the Church of the Pietà, Venice- Ian Hicks

Born in the French colony of Guadeloupe, Guillaume Lethière (1760–1832) was a key figure in the history of art during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The son of a formerly enslaved woman of color and a white government official and plantation owner, Lethière moved to France with his father at age fourteen. He trained as an artist and successfully navigated the tumult of the French Revolution and its aftermath in order to achieve the highest levels of recognition in his time. A favorite artist of Napoleon’s brother, Lucien Bonaparte, Lethière also held important positions at the Académie de France in Rome, Institut de France , and École des Beaux-Arts. A well-respected teacher, he operated a robust studio that rivaled those of his contemporaries Jacques-Louis David and Antoine-Jean Gros.

Despite his remarkable accomplishments and considerable corpus of paintings and drawings, Lethière is relatively unknown today. Lavishly illustrated and authoritative, this groundbreaking study serves to introduce Lethière to new and broader audiences and restore him to his rightful place as one of the most eminent artist of his generation. An international group of scholars offer the first comprehensive view of Lethière’s extraordinary career in its political, social, and art historical context, addressing issues of colonialism, slavery, and diaspora, as well as shedding new light on the presence and reception of Caribbean artists in France during this time.

Why did artists include prominent architectural settings in their narrative paintings? Why did they labour over specific, highly innovative structural solutions? Why did they endeavour to design original ornamental motifs which brought together sculptural, painterly and architectural approaches, as well as showcasing their understanding of materiality? Painting Architecture in Early Renaissance Italy addresses these questions in order to shed light on the early exchanges between artistic and architectural practice in Italy, arguing that architecture in painting provided a unique platform for architectural experimentation.

Rather than interpreting architectural settings as purely spatial devices and as lesser counterparts of their built cognates, this book emphasises their intrinsic value as designs as well as communicative tools, contending that the architectural imagination of artists was instrumental in redefining the status of architectural forms as a kind of cultural currency. Exploring the nexus between innovation and persuasion, Livia Lupi highlights an early form of little-discussed paragone between painting and architecture which relied on a shared understanding of architectural invention as a symbol of prestige.