Category: Research

An exceptional microsample from the ground layer of Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa was analyzed by high-angular resolution synchrotron X-ray diffraction and micro Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy, revealing a singular mixture of strongly saponified oil with high lead content and a cerussite (PbCO3)-depleted lead white pigment. The most remarkable signature in the sample is the presence of plumbonacrite (Pb5(CO3)3O(OH)2), a rare compound that is stable only in an alkaline environment. Leonardo probably endeavored to prepare a thick paint suitable for covering the wooden panel of the Mona Lisa by treating the oil with a high load of lead II oxide, PbO. The review of Leonardo’s manuscripts (original and latter translation) to track the mention of PbO gives ambiguous information. Conversely, the analysis of fragments from the Last Supper confirms that not only PbO was part of Leonardo’s palette, through the detection of both litharge (α-PbO) and massicot (β-PbO) but also plumbonacrite and shannonite (Pb2OCO3), the latter phase being detected for the first time in a historical painting.

This collection of essays from the Annual International Women in Arts Conference sheds a new light on the female genius in literature, manuscript illumination, and architecture from the Middle Ages until the end of the 18th century.

In the last few decades, the study of women in the arts has largely increased in terms of scholars involved in research and investigation, with the reception of the outcomes especially acknowledged by museums which are dedicating part of their mission to organizing exhibitions and/or acquiring the works of women. The Annual International Women in Arts Conference seeks to advance contemporary discussions on how female creativity has helped shape European culture in its heterogeneity since the Middle Ages. This volume collects the proceedings of the first conference organised in Rome, in October 2021. It focuses on the role of women in literature, art, and architecture. Throughout history, these domains were often seen as very masculine. Yet, there have been many women who have made their mark as writers, illuminators, artists and architects, or have played a decisive role as patrons and supporters in these arts. This collection of essays aims to bring these women to the fore and sheds a new light on the heritage and legacy of women in the creative arts and architecture from the Middle Ages until the 20th century.

The role holder will document and research our collection of export paintings from China, authoring catalogue records and research publications, and supporting wider public engagement with the collection. They will also seek to build collaborations with colleagues in the University and beyond.

The post-holder will be knowledgeable about, and have experience working with, 18th and 19th century Chinese paintings, particularly export arts, an understanding of the wider historical and cultural context, and be committed to developing new inclusive and diverse perspectives on these collections.

Hans Holbein was one of the most talented artists of the 16th century.  From his arrival in England in search of work he rose to royal favour, chosen to paint the portraits of Henry VIII, his family and leading figures, among them Anne Boleyn and Sir Thomas More. By his death, Holbein’s work was as admired by his contemporaries as it is today. His portraits inspired the next generation of artists in their depictions of Edward VI, Mary I and Elizabeth I.

This exhibition showcases one of the most important surviving collections of his work, and includes drawings, paintings, miniatures and book illustrations. Celebrating Holbein’s artistic skill, it explores the career of the artist and the lives of those who commissioned portraits from him, bringing us face-to-face with some of the most famous people of 16th-century England. 

The Three Philosophers by Giorgione (Italian, 1477–1510) in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna and St. Francis in the Desert by Giovanni Bellini (ca. 1424/35–1516) in The Frick Collection are two of the most celebrated paintings of the Venetian Renaissance. Documentation exists to suggest that, between at least 1525 and 1556, the two paintings were displayed together in the same house in Venice, the palazzo of Taddeo Contarini (ca. 1466–1540), a member of one of Venice’s wealthiest patrician families. For the first time in more than four hundred years these two masterpieces will be reunited. Accompanying their display at the Frick, this book explores the origins of the paintings and re-evaluates their histories in the collection of Taddeo Contarini.

For almost 20 years in the late 17th century the Queen’s House at Greenwich was the studio address of the marine painters Willem van de Velde the Elder and his son, Willem the Younger. Although the building itself bears little trace of the Van de Veldes’ presence, in the 20th century the Queen’s House once again became a home for their work, as the dedicated art gallery of the National Maritime Museum, custodian of the world’s largest collection of works by the Van de Veldes. Spanning scores of oil and pen paintings, a tapestry and some 1,500 drawings, the collection is unique in what it can tell us about how a 17th-century artist’s studio functioned. The physical evidence provided by this collection proved invaluable for the evocation of the Van de Velde studio that forms a centrepiece of the current exhibition, The Van de Veldes: Greenwich, Art and the Sea, marking 350 years since the Van de Veldes moved to England from the Dutch Republic. Showcasing major conservation projects on important works in the Greenwich collection that have their origin point in the Queen’s House studio, and notwithstanding a select number very generous loans, the exhibition was also a pragmatic solution to some of the challenges facing museums as they emerged from Covid: how to make an event out of a permanent collection.

A new attribution to Giovanni Bellini: the ‘Virgin and Child’ in Pag - BY BEATRICE TANZI

Rediscovered drawings by Bartolomeo Spani for sculpture and goldsmithery - BY MARCELLO CALOGERO

Girodet’s ‘Coriolanus taking leave of his family’ rediscovered - BY AARON WILE

Paolo Portoghesi (1931–2023) - BY ANDREW HOPKINS

John Newman (1936–2023) - BY SIMON BRADLEY

Emma, sister of the more famous Frederick, is rarely the focus of study, but her portraits of women from literature, myth and history offer a way into considering her approach to Pre-Raphaelite painting. The women Sandys depicted seen to resist a conventional interpretation, their eyes evading the viewer not through modesty but disinterest or preoccupation, their expressions often enigmatic or even challenging. In many of her painting, Sandys offers covert clues to her women's identity (an issue often further confused by the different titles used for the works), using symbolism, setting and facial expression. This illustrated lecture offers new readings of some of her paintings, and a look at some rarely-seen works by Sandys.

Dr. Serena Trowbridge is Chair of the Pre-Raphaelite Society, Senior Vice-President of the Birmingham and Midland Institute, and Reader in Victorian Literature at Birmingham City University. She has published widely on Pre-Raphaelite art and literature, and is currently working on 'Forgotten Women Pre-Raphaelites' (university of Delaware Press, 2024) and 'Pre-Raphaelite Women's Writing' (Routledge, 2025).

Paintings Conservator Melanie Caldwell will talk about projects undertaken on paintings at Knole, including the Grotesque scheme in the Cartoon Gallery, the early Portrait of Sir Ralph Bosville from around 1600 and Sir Joshua Reynold’s Portrait of Huang Ya Dong.

Panel 1 - Beginnings: Influences and Environments

David AHB Taylor (Independent): Pictor Scotus: John Michael Wright and Scotland

Molly Ingham (University of Edinburgh): Covert Catholicism: John Michael Wright and the British Catholic Experience

Maria Hayward (University of Southampton): ‘elegant and richly dressed’: Exploring Fashion and Fabrics in the Female portraiture of John Michael Wright

Panel 2 - Identity: Selfhood and Society

Kate Anderson (National Galleries of Scotland): ‘Nothing can repair my loss’: Death, Mourning and Memorialisation in the Portraits of John Michael Wright PAUL MELLON CENTRE for Studies in British Art

Karen Hearn (University College London): ‘I could not hinder my self from making it curious and full of variety…’: John Michael Wright’s Portraits of the Bagot Family, 1675-6

Matthew Augustine (University of St Andrews) and Steven Zwicker (Washington University in St Louis): Patrons, Portraits and the Fashioning of Identity: John Michael Wright beyond the Restoration Court

Panel 3 - Practice: Approaches and Associations

Helen Pearce (University of Aberdeen): John Michael Wright: Prints and Proof(s)?

James Loxley (University of Edinburgh): The Literary Connections of John Michael Wright

Catriona Murray (University of Edinburgh): Childish Things: Children and Material Culture in the Work of John Michael Wright

Panel 4 - Endings: Reception and Relationships

Carol Richardson (University of Edinburgh): Courtier, Designer and Propagandist: John Michael Wright and the 1687 Embassy to Rome

Adam Morton (Newcastle University): Promoting Religion by Means of Arts? Anti-Catholicism, Catholic Culture and John Michael Wright

Jane Eade (National Trust): The Artist and his Nephew: New Evidence from Sale Inventories 

Smell loomed large in cultural discourse in the late nineteenth century, thanks to the midcentury fear of miasma, the drive for sanitation reform, and the rise in artificial perfumery. Meanwhile, the science of olfaction remained largely mysterious, prompting an impulse to “see smell” and inspiring some artists to picture scent in order to better know and control it. This book recovers the substantive role of the olfactory in Pre-Raphaelite art and Aestheticism.

Christina Bradstreet examines the iconography and symbolism of scent in nineteenth-century art and visual culture. Fragrant imagery in the work of John Everett Millais, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Simeon Solomon, George Frederic Watts, Edward Burne-Jones, and others set the trend for the preoccupation with scent that informed swaths of British, European, and American art and design. Bradstreet’s rich analyses of paintings, perfume posters, and other works of visual culture demonstrate how artworks mirrored the “period nose” and intersected with the most clamorous debates of the day, including evolution, civilization, race, urban morality, mental health, faith, and the “woman question.”

Justin Davies & Ingrid Moortgat: The punch mark VHB : possible identification as the panel maker’s mark of Hans van Beemen alias Hans van Herentals (died 1624)

Justin Davies: Evidence of a previously unknown set of Van Dyck’s Apostles in Schloss Woyanow, Danzig in the early Twentieth century and an examination of one of the panels

Andrea Seim: Planks from the same oak tree found in different paintings

Justin Davies: Art historical considerations on same tree planks found in different paintings

Joost Vander Auwera: Jacques Jordaens, his panels and panel makers: identifications and patterns

Justin Davies: Van Dyck’s Apostles: introduction, overview and a new document Johannes Edvardsson: Dendrochronological and panel mark results from the Besançon and Konstanjevica na Krki Van Dyck related Apostles

Alexis Merle Du Bourg: The provenance of the sets of contemporary panels of Van Dyck’s Apostles in Besançon and Konstanjevica na Krki

Ingrid Goddeeris: Identifying new avenues for nineteenth-century provenance research through a focus on the Belgian art dealer Léon Gauchez using online museum files and digitised journals

James Innes-Mulraine: To Land upp into the Garden there’: Van Dyck’s lost London studio found at last

Armageddon is a cultural framework which has developed a series of conventions over centuries: the promise of rebirth after death or a saviour to turn chaos into order. Artists have long worked with and against such narrative tropes, and this book investigates the tensions between visual culture and political discourse that draw on or disrupt apocalyptic thinking. Grove complains that ‘the conceptual and temporal boundaries of apocalypses are frustrating diffuse’—but such flexibility is exactly why Armageddon has been profoundly generative as a cultural and social metaphor.53 The word ‘apocalypse’ derives from Greek, meaning ‘unveiling’, and this edited collection aims to explore and understand what modern and contemporary images of the end times may tell about the societies that gave rise to them.

The provenance of ‘Het Steen’ and ‘The rainbow landscape’ by Rubens BY LUCY DAVIS,NATALIA MUÑOZ-ROJAS

Richard Vickris Pryor in the art market of Napoleonic Europe BY LUCIA BONAZZI

From Paris to New York: French paintings from the collection of Eliza Jumel BY MARGARET OPPENHEIMER

Aby Warburg and the Volksheim exhibitions of 1902 and 1905 BY ECKART MARCHAND

Medieval and Renaissance enamels and other works of art in the Wyvern Collection BY HILTRUD WESTERMANN-ANGERHAUSEN

The Italian Renaissance altarpiece BY NICHOLAS PENNY

Obituary: Jonathan Brown (1939–2022) BY PETER CHERRY

X-rays showing changes and corrections that had been made to the work helped confirm Rembrandt as its creator. [Berlin curator Katja] Kleinert said experts were unanimous in their verdict. 

Comparisons were made with a very similar composition by Rembrandt, called Landscape with Stone Bridge at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, which the Gemäldegalerie’s director, Dagmar Hirschfeld – herself a Rembrandt expert – said shared hallmarks typical for him. 

“You quite often get pairs of paintings, where you have the impression he is trying to do the same again, but in another style of painting or to optimise what he has already achieved,” she said. Analysis of the painting in Berlin, which the gallery acquired in 1924, showed how Rembrandt had made radical changes to the work during its creation, including shifting the position of a storm cloud, reducing the size of a hill and making changes to a group of trees. These processes in turn made the painting more compact and dense.

Join celebrated art historian and curator Karen Hearn for “Big-Bellied Women: Portraying Pregnancy in 16th and 17th-Century England,” an exploration of early modern depictions of pregnancy in British art. Hearn, a former curator at Tate Britain and honorary professor at University College London, argues many early modern works depicted pregnancy overtly, contrary to previous thought, for a variety of reasons and motivations.

Bernini and His World is a unique exploration of Gian Lorenzo Bernini the sculptor, offering new insights and including discussions of the artist’s stylistic innovations and the ways in which he approached sculpture. Placing his life and work within a social, anthropological and historical context, Livio Pestilli gives a fascinating and in-depth account, from the Rome in which Bernini lived and its reception of foreign sculptors to the myth-making narrative of his biographers, and the judgements of his critics.