Category: Research
Did Durer see 'Salvator Mundi'?
November 15 2011
Picture: Alte Pinakothek, Munich/(C) Salvator Mundi LLC/Tim Nighswander/Imaging4Art
A learned reader writes:
Bravo for your excellent and instant review; I am still digesting my own visit. I haven’t so far seen in print, but I’m surely not the first to suggest, a connection between the Salvator Mundi and Dürer’s Munich self-portrait? It may tell us little as Dürer’s itinerary and the disputed date will hardly anchor the early provenance of the Leonardo (and of course it says nothing about other versions)…
Durer was one of the first northern European artists to see the Italian Renaissance at first hand, and went to Italy twice, first from May 1494 to the spring of 1495, and then from 1505-7. Both trips are thought to have centred around Venice. By the time of the second trip he was a famous artist, and even secured important commissions. In a letter to Germany, he wrote:
How shall I long for the sun in the cold; here I am a gentleman, at home I am a parasite.
There is though little evidence of exactly where he went and who he met. The Self-Portrait is dated 1500, so if it was at all influenced by Salvator Mundi it would have to have been on the first trip. But at the National Gallery, Salvator Mundi is dated to '1499 onwards'.
Did Durer see something of Leonardo's work? Most likely. Did he see Salvator Mundi? Who knows, and of course there are plenty of other iconographic prompts for the full-frontal Christ-like portrayal. But it's an intriguing theory. And remember - you heard it here first...
New British Art Journal
November 7 2011
The latest issue of the BAJ is out. Articles include:
- New evidence of Rossetti's admiration for Theodor von Holst (1810-144) by Max Browne
- A contribution to the iconography of Maria Walpole (1736-1807) [ie, a newly attributed portrait of her, by Nathaniel Dance] by Corey Piper
- George Wilson (1840-90) and late 19th Century watercolour painting, by Margaretta S Frederick
- New Light on Nicholas Hilliard, by Graham Reynolds [this piece contains some distinctly, how shall I say, interesting new attributions to Hilliard. Accept with caution!]
- Censored flesh: The wounded body as unprepresentable in the art of the First World War, by Debra Lennard [a fascinating piece]
- Liotard at the Royal Academy, 1773, by William Hauptman
- Jacques Laurent Agasse (1767-1849); An investigation of his painting practice and an overview of his career, by Jessica David
- A New Portrait of Mary Rogers, Lady Harrington, by John Stephan Edwards
- Fact or Fiction? Elizabeth Thompson's 'Balaclava' and the art of re-construction, by Rachel Anchor
A lecture on Elizabethan miniatures, I think...
November 4 2011
Here's an interesting sounding paper being given at the V&A next week:
A Work of Face rather than Sense: The Elizabethan Miniature as an Ostensorium of Early Modern Artistic, Alchemistic and Theological Production
Chistiane Hille (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität)
I wonder if Google Translate has been involved somewhere here...
'None such like it'
November 3 2011
A model maker and an Oxford academic have combined forces to recreate Nonsuch Palace, Henry VIII's modest hunting lodge. the model looks most impressive, but the sculpted panels on the outside would surely have been painted, as seen in Joris Hoefnagel's 1568 watercolour.
According to Samuel Pepys, who visited the palace in 1665 during the Plague (when his office was temporarily moved from London), the palace was covered with paintings by Holbein and Rubens on the outside. He describes the house in his diary, but of course it wasn't long until he was distracted by a female, so the description is frustratingly brief:
...a fine place it hath heretofore been, and a fine prospect about the house. A great walk of an elme and a walnutt set one after another in order. And all the house on the outside filled with figures of stories, and good painting of Rubens’ or Holben’s doing. And one great thing is, that most of the house is covered, I mean the posts, and quarters in the walls; covered with lead, and gilded. I walked into the ruined garden, and there found a plain little girle, kinswoman of Mr. Falconbridge, to sing very finely by the eare only, but a fine way of singing, and if I come ever to lacke a girle again I shall think of getting her.
If only Pepys and George Vertue had been one and the same person... More pictures of the model here. The best are in this week's Country Life magazine.
National Gallery Leonardo technical bulletin
October 27 2011
Picture: National Gallery, Leonardo's 'Virgin of the Rocks' (detail) in Infra-Red.
The latest National Gallery Technical Bulletin is out, and, wonderfully, freely available online with zoomable high-res images. Art History nirvana doesn't get much better than this. Essays include:
- Leonardo in Verrocchio’s Workshop: Re-examining the Technical Evidence by Jill Dunkerton
- Leonardo da Vinci’s 'Virgin of the Rocks': Treatment, Technique and Display by Larry Keith, Ashok Roy, Rachel Morrison and Peter Schade
- Altered Angels: Two Panels from the Immaculate Conception Altarpiece once in San Francesco Grande, Milan by Rachel Billinge, Luke Syson and Marika Spring
- Painting Practice in Milan in the 1490s: The Influence of Leonardo, by Marika Spring, Antonio Mazzotta, Ashok Roy, Rachel Billinge and David Peggie
Michelangelo (?) makes it to Rome
October 25 2011
The Kober family must be jumping for joy after their painting (which they believe to be) by Michelangelo is to be exhibited in Rome as part of an exhibition of the artist's work.
The painting affectionately known by the family as 'The Mike' was kept behind a sofa after a dusting incident knocked it off the wall. The painting is believed to date from c.1545 and depicts Mary with her arms open over the body of Jesus, whose arms are held by angels.
Although opinions on the painting are still contradictory, it marks an important stage in its acceptance since research by the owner begun back in 2002. Kober suggests that the painting was undertaken by the Italian master at the age of seventy and was painted for his friend Vittoria Colonna. It was eventually passed on to a cardinal, and archbishop and a family in Croatia where it hung in a castle for many years. The painting entered the Kober family through marriage from a German baroness who willed it to his great-great grandfather's sister in law.
Last year Michelangelo expert William E. Wallace didn't go as far as confirming its authenticity but didn't rule it out. The process of getting everyone to agree on attributions for paintings of this age is a long and tricky one, and no doubt this particular example will always be questioned. It is however a very interesting story well worth following...
More here.
By LH.
Another reason to go to the Gainsborough Study Day
October 21 2011
Picture: Holburne Museum
The organisers have been in touch to say that Rica Jones will also be speaking at the Study Day (14th Nov), on 'Insights into the production of Gainsborough's landscapes in the Sudbury-Ipswich period'. Jones, of the Tate conservation department, has made a hugely valuable conribution to Gainsborough studies with her technical analysis of Gainsborough's work, in particular his use of glazes.
See you all there!
Leonardo as homosexual
October 20 2011
Picture: Wikipedia
It's started - just when you thought the art world had covered every Leonardo angle in the run up to the National Gallery show, now the 'he was gay' headlines. From Jonathan Jones in The Guardian:
The idea that Leonardo could be aroused by a woman at all is a bit of a surprise. This is not the image of him that has come down to us. Ever since Renaissance witnesses recorded that he loved to surround himself with beautiful young men, his homosexuality has been an open secret. As a youth, he was twice accused of sodomy, though never prosecuted (apparently because the young men who were charged with him came from powerful and wealthy families). Yet Leonardo, as Vasari's account of his life and the artist's own notebooks confirm, went on to live openly with a household of youths led by Salai, his handsome, thieving apprentice – to whom he eventually left the Mona Lisa.
Jones makes much of Sigmund Freud's analysis of Leonardo's sexuality. Since Freud's theory was built partly on the nutty notion of finding hidden symbols (a vulture, above) in Leonardo's Virgin and Child with St Anne, I can't give it much time. Jones goes onto identify the central problem with the gay Leonardo theory - why is his (known) output dominated by so many portraits of beautiful women? Indeed:
The artist had a theory about art and sex [...] In his notebooks, he argues that painting is the greatest of all the arts because it can set a picture of your lover before you. A pastoral painting can remind you, in winter, of summer in the country with your beloved. He goes further, into blasphemy. He boasts that he once painted a Madonna so beautiful that the man who bought it was haunted by unseemly thoughts. Even after it was altered, perhaps with the addition of crosses and saintly symbols (as was done in Leonardo's second version of The Virgin of the Rocks), it still gave him an erection when he tried to pray. So in the end he returned the painting to Leonardo, who delighted in this pornographic triumph.
In which case, where are the similarly erotic paintings of boys? Now, I'm not at all trying to argue that Leonardo either was or wasn't gay. He probably liked a little of both, so to speak, and, well, why not? But it will be a shame if the coming crescendo of Leonardo coverage is dominated by ill-informed speculation over his sexuality. He was a genius first, and epic artist second. Shagger probably comes some way down the list.
Update: It's spreading - check out the 'phallic animal' caption here.
Leonardo as natural scientist and philosopher?
October 19 2011
Picture: Royal Collection
Amble on over to Art History Today for a splendidly informative post on Leonardo's fascination with nature:
...it should never be forgotten that Leonardo was primarily a painter; it would therefore be wrong to regard him as a dry scientist recording the natural world with cold detachment. Kenneth Clark puts it best: “the direction of his scientific researches was established by his aesthetic attitudes. He loved certain forms, he wanted to draw them, and while drawing them he began to ask questions, why were they that shape and what were the laws of their growth?” Out of Leonardo’s delight in drawing and painting natural things emerged his scientific urge and insatiable curiosity which powered it.
Gainsborough study day in Bath
October 17 2011
Picture: Holburne Museum
What could be nicer than spending a whole day discussing Gainsborough, surrounded by some of his best landscapes, in the city in which he painted?
There will be a Gainsborough Study Day at the Holburne Museum in Bath on Monday 14th November, price £50. The day will coincide with the museum's Gainsborough landscapes exhibition. Speakers include:
- Dr Martin Postle, (Assistant Director for Academic Activities, the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art and Trustee of the Holburne Museum)
- Dr Susan Sloman (exhibition Curator)
- Prof Deanna Petherbridge
- Hugh Belsey (Senior Research Fellow, Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, London)
- Dr Steve Poole (Principal Lecturer in English Social and Cultural History, University of the West of England)
- Prof Peter Holman (Professor Emeritus of Historical Musicology, University of Leeds)
Over on another art history blog...
October 17 2011
...you'll find an article featuring - me! Three Pipe Problem is a fascinating site offering in depth analysis on all aspects of art history, with a particular emphasis on science and technical analysis.
The writer behind 3PP is Hasan Niyazi, who has a background in clinical sciences. Niyazi's scientific training gives his views on art the sort of analytical edge you don't often find amongst art historians. In this piece, he looks at connoisseurship - an issue readers of this site will know I often bang on about - and proposes an ingenious system of reporting for art historical discoveries.
Niyazi has often been baffled by the huge differences in reporting findings in his two disciplines of science and art history. For example, any scientific discovery should be reported in a weighty peer-reviewed journal, with all the available data published for analysis and debate, and opposing views given equal weight. Whereas in art history, the evidence for a discovery can often be nothing more than the pronouncement of a single expert. So Niyazi suggests (and I'm paraphrasing) what should be an industry-accepted system based on: (1) stylistic, thematic and iconographic evidence; (2) documentary evidence; (3) visual and technical evidence; and (4) consensus - critical response and peer review.
The dangers of 'science', art history and optimism
October 13 2011
All images: Art History Today/Graeme Cameron
A new self-published book has made a number of startling art historical claims. The most eye-catching is a new theory on the Mona Lisa: the sitter is, claims Graeme Cameron, an idealised portrait of Leonardo's mother. Cameron also lays claim to a new Leonardo Self-Portrait, and a Portrait of Elizabeth I by Hans Holbein.
Although I have only seen the findings published over at Art History Today, rarely have I seen so many wild theories in a single book. It's worth ordering a copy of the book out of sheer fascination. The theories highlight how too much 'scientific' analysis of paintings can lead one off on wild tangents if you're not grounded in proper art historical training and connoisseurship. [More below]
How do you find a Leonardo?
October 12 2011
Picture: Artinfo/Science Television Workshop. Martin Kemp examines 'La Bella Principessa'.
With good old fashioned connoisseurship (partly). Martin Kemp, Leonardo scholar and proponent of the putative Leonardo discovery La Bella Principessa, explains, in an interview for ArtInfo:
Connoisseurship still plays a role. It's much denigrated and criticized, but ultimately, without connoisseurship, we really wouldn't know Leonardo's work at all. It's still a fundamental tool in establishing what was done by him and when it was done, since none of it is signed, none of it is dated, and, apart from "The Last Supper," nothing has a continuous provenance. So you still have a lot of that rather old-fashioned judgment by eye to do.
So, in the flesh, you look at it. It's on vellum, and you can see the extent to which the surface is deteriorated, which you can't see, really, in a digital file, which smooths out the surface. You can begin to see where it's been restored — as you look at it in different light and from different angles, the physicality of it becomes apparent. But that's only your starting point. Then, all the heavy-duty research comes in, and we now have, of course, an enormous body of extra things we can look at. So the initial connoisseur's reaction merely tells you that something is worth looking at, but at any point one wrong thing can throw that all away — a later pigment, a bit of something that might come up about its history to indicate it was forged at some point, and so on. I was trained as a scientist, and if you have a scientific theory, you only need have one bit of the experiment that says, "this is not right," and the whole thing collapses. You always have to be looking for that one thing that is going to demolish the whole expectation that's being set up.
Kemp also backs away from the ludicrous 'Leonardo finger print' evidence that was much touted in his recent book on the Principessa. Even an amateur sleuth could see that the 'finger print' discovered by the controversial art investigator Peter Paul Biro was entirely unconvincing. Kemp now says:
I would not now probably say much about it at all, because on reflection I think we don't have an adequate reference bank of Leonardo fingerprints. I've talked to fingerprint specialists, and they typically require a full set of reference prints. We don't have that for Leonardo. My sense is — and this is Pascal's sense, too — that it's probably premature, given what we know about Leonardo's fingerprints, to come up with matches at all.
For a more thorough analysis of the whole Principessa case, toodle over to Three Pipe Problem.
Restitution - a case study
October 10 2011
Picture: Philip Mould Ltd
This is worth going to: Dr Clarence Epstein of the Max Stern Art Restitution Project will be in London on 20th October to give a talk on tracking down Nazi-looted art. Max Stern was a Jewish art dealer forced to dissolve his business, with his pictures sold at knock-down prices. The lecture is at 8pm at Goodenough College, Mecklenburgh Square London (near Russell Sq.). Call 020 7520 1535 for seats.
We recently gave the above Flemish picture back to the Stern collection. It had originally been sold from Stern's collection at Lempertz auction house in Germany. And guess where we bought it, unknowingly, some 70 years later? Lempertz. And would they give us a refund? Nein...
For your shelves - my publishing picks
October 10 2011
Some art history books just out:
- Human Connections in the Age of Vermeer, by Arthur K. Wheelock, Danielle Lokin
- Lost and Found: Wright of Derby's View of Gibraltar, by John Bonehill
- Pamphilj and the Arts: Patronage and Consumption in Baroque Rome, by Stephanie C. Leone
- Rubens and Britain, by Karen Hearn [pedantic point, Rubens would have come to England. Britain didn't exist.]
- Velazquez, by Norbert Wolf
- Gainsborough Landscapes: Themes and Variations, by Susan Sloman
New Burlington Magazine out
October 6 2011
Picture: Burlington Magazine
The October issue is now out, and includes some good new discoveries:
- A new painting by Perino del Vaga for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. (By Linda Wolk-Simon)
- A new painting by Perino del Vaga: recent cleaning and technical observations. (By Michael Gallagher)
- Two unpublished oil studies by Federico Barocci in the Nationalmuseum, Stockholm. (By Daniel Prytz)
- Pietro Testa and the ‘Museo cartaceo’. (By Ingo Herklotz)
- New portraits of Thomas Jenkins, James Byres and Gavin Hamilton. (By Antonello Cesareo)
- Robert Smirke and the court of the Shah of Persia. (By Christopher Baker)
- An intrusive portrait by Goya. (By Duncan Bull, Anna Krekeler, Matthias Alfeld, Joris Dik and Koen Janssens)
Where AHN leads, The Sunday Times follows...
October 5 2011
I forgot to brag about the Mona Lisa background story making it into the Sunday Times this weekend (even with a little quote from moi). Here was the original post.
Plug Alert - buy this new book!
October 3 2011
Picture: Ashgate Publishing
Nothing to do with art history, but plenty of history: I've contributed to a new book on 19th Century British Foreign Policy. The book, edited by my friend and co-author Dr. Geoffrey Hicks, looks at a previously neglected aspect of British foreign policy, and focuses on the political legacy of the Earls of Derby.
The 14th Earl of Derby (left on the cover) was Prime Minister three times, while his son, the 15th Earl (right), was Foreign Secretary twice and the only man to serve in the Cabinets of both Disraeli and Gladstone. My chapter deals with the 15th Earl's foreign policy, and the question of whether foreign interventionism is ever worthwhile. You can buy the book here!
New evidence on '£100m Leonardo' drawing
September 29 2011
Martin Kemp, a leading Leonardo scholar, has unearthed some compelling evidence about the controversial drawing 'La Bella Principessa'. It was sold as a 19th Century pastiche by Christie's in 1998 for £11,400, but some now say it is by Leonardo and worth £100m.
The drawing is on vellum, and Kemp says he has now found the actual 15th Century volume from which it was taken (in Poland). From The Guardian:
[Kemp] has identified the drawing as a missing sheet from a 15th-century volume linked to Leonardo's great patron, the Duke of Milan, Ludovico Sforza.
Last year, Kemp provisionally identified the sitter as Bianca, the duke's illegitimate daughter, who died a few months after her marriage at the age of 13. This identification was supported by the title page of the Sforziad, a volume celebrating the Sforzas; symbols in the book show that it was a wedding gift.
"Assertions that it is a forgery, a pastiche, or a copy of a lost Leonardo are all effectively eliminated," Kemp told the Guardian. Earlier this year, he embarked on what he describes as a "needle-in-a-haystack" search for a 15th-century volume with a missing sheet. A clue lay in the stitch-holes along the portrait's left-hand margin, suggesting it had been torn from a luxury-bound volume. But the chances of this volume surviving 500 years were remote, and the chances of it being found even remoter.
Against the odds, Kemp tracked the volume down, to Poland's national library in Warsaw; the stitch-holes are a perfect match for those on La Bella Principessa, a portrait in ink and coloured chalks on vellum. It is overwhelming evidence, Kemp says, that the portrait dates from the 15th century – and not the 19th century, as Christie's thought when it sold it in 1998 for £11,400 (it could fetch £100m as a Leonardo).
So, if true, this is indeed proof that the drawing dates from the 15th Century (which is fairly obvious just by looking at it), and puts to shame those who said it was a later fake. Whether it proves it is by Leonardo or not is another matter...
Annual Soane Lecture, 10th November
September 28 2011
Here's a date for your diary: the annual Soane Lecture is this year on Thursday 10th November. The subject is When in Rome: John Soane's Roman Sightseeing, and will be given by writer and historian, Matthew Sturgis. Full details here.
