Category: Research
New Raphael acquisition at Staedel
December 13 2011
Picture: Staedel Museum, Frankfurt, [called] Raphael & Workshop, 'Portrait of Pope Julius II', 1511/12, Oil on poplar panel, 105.6 x 78.5cm.
The Staedel Museum in Frankfurt has acquired what it says is a newly discovered version of Raphael's portrait of Pope Julius II. The original is in the National Gallery, London. The Staedel says their new version is painted by Raphael and his workshop. Full details available in the press release here.
Key to their conclusions are the apparent changes visible in the picture, as revealed in the x-rays and infra-red photographs: [more below]
Rijksmuseum images available for free
December 12 2011
Picture: Rijksmuseum, Sir Anthony Van Dyck, Portrait drawing of Charles I (detail)
Splendid news*: the Rijksmuseum have now joined the growing band of museums that allow people to use their images for free, even in publications. The only proviso is that the work must be correctly attributed and captioned. As you can see from the Rijksmuseum's excellent website, good high-resolution images are available online already. To celebrate, here is a detail from one of Van Dyck's finest drawings, of Charles I.
*via art historian Hannah Williams
Fakes, fakes everywhere
December 5 2011
Picture: NY Times - a disputed Jackson Pollock.
At last the scandal that has been waiting to hit the modern and contemporary art world is gathering momentum. Recently we've had the news of the German fakers, and now the NY times has broken news of another possible forgery ring, this time in the US:
Federal authorities are investigating whether a parade of paintings and drawings, sold for years by some of New York’s most elite art dealers as the work of Modernist masters like Robert Motherwell and Jackson Pollock, actually consists of expert forgeries, according to people who have been interviewed or briefed by the investigators.
Most of the works, which have sold individually for as much as $17 million, came to market though a little-known art dealer from Long Island, Glafira Rosales, who said she had what every gallery dreams of: exclusive access to a mystery collector’s cache of undiscovered work by some of the postwar world’s great talents, including Mark Rothko and Richard Diebenkorn.
The story may be related to the sudden closure of the legendary New York gallery Knoedler last week, after 165 years in business. Knoedler has been hit with a lawsuit from client Pierre Lagrange, who alleges that a Jackson Pollock he bought from the gallery in 2007 for $17m is a fake. Tests conducted by Mr Lagrange have established that two pigments found inthe picture were not invented till after Pollock's death.
New Rembrandt discovered
December 2 2011
Picture: BBC News
Professor Ernst van de Wetering and his team at the Rembrandt Research Project have unveiled a newly discovered work by Rembrandt. It belongs to a private owner, and will go on display in Antwerp between in May and June next year. Looks like a nice picture, full of pathos.
Apparently an unfinished self-portrait by Rembrandt can be detected beneath the painting, outlined in red below. That self-portrait is only known through a copy, below left. But, personally, I'll need to see better photos to be convinced of this...
How do you turn a copy of a Leonardo into 'a Leonardo'?
December 1 2011
Picture: Sotheby's
By asking an American jury... Click your way over to Art History Today for a fascinating post on the so-called 'Hahn Leonardo', the painting at the centre of a fascinating court case in New York in 1929. The Hahn's had sued art dealer Joseph Duveen for calling their picture 'a copy' of the original in the Louvre - they contended it was the original. Despite Duveen being manifestly right, and despite him having the support of a whole host of art historians including Bernard Berenson, he lost the case, and had to pay $60,000 in damages.
The case effectively boiled down to whether a US court believed the plucky US owner, or a bunch of snooty (mostly European) art 'experts'. But it also highlighted the debate on connoisseurship, and the science of establishing attribution. Although Duveen et al said, entirely rightly, that the picture was too poor to be an original, they found it hard to prove that empirically in court. As David Packwood says in his post:
...the presiding magistrate, Judge William Harman Black, dismissed all the expertise of the connoisseurs as inadmissible; and Black demanded much more rigorous methods to prove the ability to determine the authorship of paintings. Enter science, particularly x-rays to make connoisseurship transparent to a lay public. [...]
[Connoisseurship] was seen as kind of “magic” by Judge Black. Berenson’s “magic”, which to use Brewer’s words was “a subjective technique dependant on the eye”, could not be verified objectively; a way of scientizing attributions was therefore demanded.
The Hahn picture sold at auction recently for $1.5m, a ridiculous price for a later copy. Compare it and the original for yourself. Which do you prefer? Check out the hard flesh tones, the slightly staring eyes, and especially the smooth and rounded folds in the drapery of the Hahn picture. Note also the unsubtle characterisation compared to the original. See what I mean? Then pass step 1 of the DIY Connoisseurship Course.
New Burlington Magazine
November 28 2011
The new Burlington Magazine has just arrived with the following interesting articles:
- The rediscovery of Pieter Bruegel the Elder's 'Wine of St Martin's Day', acquired for the Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid. By Pilar Silva Maroto and Manfred Sellink.
- Zanobi Machiavelli, Battista Strozzi and the high altar of the Badia Fiesolana. By James Shaw.
- Phillipe de Champaigne c.1630: a rediscovered 'Pentecost' for the Carmelites in rue Saint-Jacques. Paris. By Guillaume Kientz.
- Selling Leonardo's 'Virgin of the rocks' By Thereza Wells.
- Artemisia Gentileschi's 'Christ and the woman of Samaria' By Richard E. Spear.
- More Adey, the Carfax Gallery and 'The Burlington Magazine'. By Barbara Pezzini.
- The Manet exhibition in Paris, 2011. By Juliet Wilson Bareau.
It is also worth noting that for all you Art History students out there, you can become a subscriber to the online version of this iconic magazine for a paltry £15 a year - i assure you, its worth it!
More here.
By LH.
Newly restored something at Dulwich Picture Gallery
November 25 2011
Picture: Dulwich Picture Gallery
A curious example of poor websitery over at Dulwich Picture Gallery. Announcing the 'stunning restoration' of a 17th Century work Saint Cecilia, they've illustrated it with the most tiny of images (above). The picture was previously thought to have been by Annibale Carracci, but has now been 'de-attributed' (tho' we are not told why). Don't you find it odd when museums assume visitors to their site only want the most trivial of details, or the smallest of images? If Dulwich put a better image up, they might find someone to help them with the attribution...
'Salvator Mundi' - it's all balls
November 21 2011
Picture: Salvator Mundi LLC
There's an interesting interview with Leonardo Scholar Martin Kemp over on Artinfo, in which he discusses his role in attributing the Salvator Mundi. He reveals that one of the things which convinced him about the picture is the orb in Christ's hand. After he first saw the painting he went down to the Ashmolean Museum to look at one of their rock crystal orbs:
What was striking for me was the orb, and I've subsequently researched it quite heavily. The "Salvator Mundi" obviously holds the mundus, the world which he's saving, and it was absolutely unlike anything I've seen before. The orbs in other Salvator Mundis, often they're of a kind of brass or solid. Sometimes they're terrestrial globes, sometimes they're translucent glass, and one or two even have little landscapes in them. What this one had was an amazing series of glistening little apertures — they're like bubbles, but they're not round — painted very delicately, with just a touch of impasto, a touch of dark, and these little sort of glistening things, particularly around the part where you get the back reflections. And that said to me: rock crystal. Because rock crystal gets what are called inclusions, and to get clear rock crystal is very difficult, particularly big bits. So there are these little gaps, which are slightly irregular in shape, and I thought, well, that's pretty fancy. And Leonardo was a bit of an expert on rock crystal. He was asked to judge vases that Isabella d'Este was thinking of buying, and he loved those materials.
So when I was back in Oxford, I went to the geology department, and I said, "Let's have a look at some rock crystal." And in the Ashmolean Museum, in a wunderkammer of curiosities, there is a big rock crystal ball, and that has inclusions, so we photographed it under comparable lighting conditions I also began to look at the heel of the hand underneath the globe in the "Salvator Mundi"; there are two heels. The restorer thought it was a pentimento, but I wondered if he was recording a double refraction of the kind you get with a calcite sphere. If this proves to be right, it would be absolutely Leonardesque. I like these things when they're not just connoisseurship. None of the copyists knew that. They just transcribed it. Some of them do better than others, but none of them got this crystal with its possible double refraction. And one of the points of the crystal sphere is that it relates iconographically to the crystalline sphere of the heavens, because in Ptolemaic cosmology the stars were in the fixed crystalline sphere, and so they were embedded. So what you've got in the "Salvator Mundi" is really a "a savior of the cosmos", and this is a very Leonardesque transformation.
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...
Turner and the Telescope
November 15 2011
Picture: Graves Art Gallery, Sheffield
A new book on Turner will claim that the artist based his depictions of the sun on the scientific theories of the astronomer Sir William Herschel. From The Guardian:
... Turner biographer James Hamilton has uncovered compelling evidence that the artist was far more interested in cutting-edge scientific theories than has been thought.
One painting in particular – The Festival of the Opening of the Vintage at Mâcon [Graves Art Gallery, Sheffield] – holds, Hamilton believes, a fascinating secret. The painting, executed in 1803 after Turner travelled through France, is dominated by a ferocious sun, and Hamilton argues that it is painted in an entirely new and revolutionary way, based on scientific theories expounded by the astronomer Sir William Herschel.
Herschel gave a groundbreaking lecture to the Royal Society in 1801, in which he revealed his discovery that the sun had a surface with "openings, shallows, ridges, nodules, corrugations, indentations and pores". [...] Hamilton said Herschel examined the sun through his telescope near Slough, passing the light through watered ink, "and he saw the sun, for the first time, as an object. He saw it had a surface".
Not long after the discovery, Turner was painting the Mâcon festivities and appears to have painted the sun as Herschel had described.
"In a sense you can't really see it, you can't focus on it, but if you look very, very closely there is a tiny little disc which is in three distinct parts," said Hamilton. "They are painted in different ways – there's a dab and a wipe and sort of flick of the brush. He is making it into something, he is giving it a surface and coming so close to Herschel's lecture and his naming of parts, one has to see them as connected events."
This sounds a little tenuous to me. It could be a combination of painterliness and condition. But I'll look closely when I next go to Sheffield. In the meantime, there's a large-ish version online here.
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.
