Category: Research

“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.

The proposed PhD project, ’Experimental Approaches to Global Histories of Art and Architecture’, will uncover and historicise experimental approaches to the history of art and architecture, with the aim of exploring diverse epistemological viewpoints. We are interested in PhD projects on artists, architects, historians, critics, and curators who used alternative media to challenge the narratives and methodologies of the history of art and architecture. The PhD project could focus on objects and practices that take the form of artworks, buildings, more complex intermedia projects, or curatorial and pedagogical experiments. The experimental practices under study may have emerged at any point from the nineteenth century to today, anywhere in world. Methodologically, the project encourages PhD candidates to uncover unpublished and under-examined sources that can help us rethink existing disciplinary frameworks.

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.

One of the main goals of this unique series is to understand the complex and multi-layered interaction between women and the evolution of a major national museum. It will include new studies focused on female artists’ production and their presence or absence in museum rooms. But it will go beyond these established topics to examine the link between the formation of the collections of the Prado Museum and women patrons. It will also commission work on women who inspired and received works of art that were incorporated into the collections, not forgetting the contribution of women in technical and ancillary roles. The broad chronology will enable us to trace and reflect the changing role of women and their relationship with the arts, as well as the evolution of a major Western cultural institution and its dependence on women.

Presenting a more expansive and inclusive history of sculpture, Great Women Sculptors surveys the work of more than 300 trailblazing artists from over 60 countries, spanning 500 years from the Renaissance to the present day.

Organized alphabetically, each artist is represented by an image and newly commissioned text. This wide-ranging survey champions the best-known women sculptors from art history alongside today’s rising stars. From more recognizable names such as Camille Claudel, Gego, Barbara Hepworth, and Yayoi Kusama to some of today’s most significant contemporary artists including Huma Bhaba, Mona Hatoum, and Simone Leigh, this book showcases 500 years of sculptural creativity in one accessible, visually stunning volume.

The inventory, which is part of the government’s efforts to bring “justice, reparation and dignity” to the victims of the conflict and the subsequent dictatorship, was posted online on Wednesday. [...]

Spain’s culture minister, Ernest Urtasun, said the list was about much more than his department fulfilling the obligations set out in the Democratic Memory law, which was approved by the senate in October 2022.

“We’re offering a space in which people can learn about our history,” he said. “We’re also opening the door to returning those pieces that can be identified to their rightful owners.”

The ministry said that applications for the return of the lost items would be considered on a case-by-case basis.

Largely unknown to the general public and art historians, the Orléans collection comprises some 900 drawings by Dutch, Flemish, German, Austrian, English, Swiss and Swedish artists from the Renaissance to the nineteenth century. A selection of more than 150 drawings, most of which have never been shown to the public, is presented in the exhibition.

The catalogue raisonné by David Mandrella, a specialist in Dutch and Flemish art, is the result of several years of research. It includes entries and reproductions of all of the drawings in the collection, from Goltzius to Jongkind, through Rubens, Jordaens and Spranger.

Nothing to do with Menander: a rediscovered Roman cameo from the Caylus Collection - BY ITTAI GRADEL 

Reaching the Buddhist paradise: early images of Buddhas and bodhisattvas in Koguryŏ - BY ARIANE PERRIN

Expanding the oeuvre of the master metalsmith Orazio Fortezza - BY FLORA TURNER-VUČETIĆ

The Cathedral of Notre-Dame-de-la- Conception, Pondicherry - BY GAUVIN ALEXANDER BAILEY

The art of Qing imperial afterlife: the ‘Pictures of ancient playthings’ (Guwantu 古玩圖) revisited - BY RICARDA BROSCH

Renaissance exhibitions in Paris - BY NICHOLAS HERMAN

We are currently looking for a permanent staff member to join our Restitution team in London. The role includes research into the provenance of artworks predating 1946 as well as servicing our global client base. The candidate must be a fluent German speaker and have a strong interest in history and the art world, in particular research and restitution issues relating to cultural property. They should have experience of and enjoy working in a fast-paced, commercial environment where analysing and assessing risks goes hand in hand with making decisions independently under time pressure. While a background in art and/or (German) history is useful for this role, we are looking for candidates with risk management/risk assessment skills. This experience does not necessarily need to have been gained in the art world.

John Trumbull (1756–1843) experienced the American Revolution firsthand—he served as aid to George Washington and Horatio Gates, was shot at, and was jailed as a spy. He made it his mission to record the war, giving visual form to what most citizens of the new United States thought: that they had brought into the world a great and unprecedented political experiment. His purpose, he wrote, was “to preserve and diffuse the memory of the noblest series of actions which have ever presented themselves in the history of man.” Although Trumbull’s contemporaries viewed him as a painter, Trumbull thought of himself as a historian.

This fully illustrated catalogue presents the most up-to-date research on the seventy-five paintings in the National Gallery created in the German-speaking lands before 1800. Among them are important groups of works by artists such as Hans Holbein the Younger—including his famous double portrait The Ambassadors of 1533—Lucas Cranach the Elder, Albrecht Dürer, Adam Elsheimer, the fifteenth-century Cologne painter known as the Master of the Saint Bartholomew Altarpiece and his Westphalian contemporary, the Master of Liesborn.

This is the first catalogue of the National Gallery’s German paintings since 1959 and includes revelatory entries on a number of important new acquisitions, among them significant works by Albrecht Altdorfer, Wolf Huber, Franz Anton Maulbertsch, Hans Rottenhammer and Hans Wertinger. The German Paintings before 1800 also includes two essays, the first discussing the history of the paintings’ acquisition by the National Gallery and the taste for German painting in Britain, and the second addressing the ways in which these German artists produced their work.

Lincoln College invites applications for a three-year, non-renewable, Junior Research Fellowship in Material Culture: Art History, available from 1 September 2024. This post is intended to provide a career development opportunity for a scholar in the early stages of an academic career. Applicants should have recently obtained, or be about to obtain, a doctorate in an appropriate field, and will be in the early stages of developing a research profile within their field of scholarship.