Previous Posts: January 2026

With a history reaching back over four centuries, the Princely Collections are part of a long tradition of collecting that spans many generations. Essential to this at all times has been a policy of active collecting. In the past as in the present, new acquisitions shaped the appearance of the galleries. The art collection has thus been formed not only by the personal tastes of the various princes but also by the art market with its changing sales strategies, trend-setting individuals, and economic factors.

Against this background, the upcoming temporary exhibition mounted by the Princely Collections is to be devoted to the fascinating history of the European art market. Spotlights will be shone on structures, centres of innovation, influential personalities and marketing methods from antiquity to the nineteenth century, revealing that many of these methods have changed very little up to the present day. Auctions were held in ancient imperial Rome. In Antwerp, art trade fairs were already attracting an international clientele in the sixteenth century, and the first catalogues raisonnés of Old Masters were compiled by art dealers in the eighteenth century.

These and other enthralling insights into the history of the European art market await you from 30 January 2026 at the Liechtenstein Garden Palace in Vienna, with major works from the Princely Collections appearing alongside sensational loans in the largest annual temporary exhibition we have mounted to date. The extensive catalogue will boast essays by leading experts in the field of art market scholarship, bringing interdisciplinary approaches to bear in a volume that will provide a comprehensive overview of the subject.

The Art Institute of Chicago is excited to invite current undergraduate and recent graduates (within one year of graduation) to apply to our McMullan Arts Leadership Internship Program.

The goals of the McMullan Arts Leadership internship program is to be part of a museum-wide effort to provide students the opportunity to gain experience, career awareness, networks, and skills that will position them to thrive as future art museum leaders.  

A View of One’s Own showcases landscape drawings and watercolours by British women artists working between 1760 and 1860, whose work represents a growing area of The Courtauld’s collection. These artists range from highly accomplished amateurs to those ambitious for more formal recognition. They have remained mostly unknown, and their works largely unpublished. [...]

10 artists are featured in the exhibition. They include Harriet Lister and Lady Mary Lowther, who were among the first to depict the Lake District; Amelia Long, Lady Farnborough, one of the first British artists to travel to France following the Napoleonic Wars; and Elizabeth Batty – whose works appearing in the show were only rediscovered a few years ago.

While his [Correggio's] legacy places him on par with artistic titans such as Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael, and Titian, his name and works are less familiar to the general public today. Based on the unique collection of his panel paintings in the Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister and the restoration of Correggio’s Madonna of St. Sebastian the exhibition features exceptional international loans from all over the world. This first comprehensive survey of his artistic career ever presented outside of Italy, highlights Correggio‘ s mastery in conveying deep emotion and draws attention to his unparalleled ability to cast the divine in a convincingly human mould. 

Born in Greenbush, New York in 1844, Lewis became the first sculptor of Black and Indigenous (Mississauga) descent to achieve international recognition. Beginning her career in Boston in 1863, she traveled to Rome in 1866 to join the leading American sculptors of her generation, breaking international, racial and gender barriers. "Sometimes the times were dark and the outlook was lonesome, but where there is a will, there is a way,” Lewis recalled in 1878. “That is what I tell my people whenever I meet them, that they must not be discouraged, but work ahead until the world is bound to respect them for what they have accomplished.” [...]

Discover the first museum exhibition of its kind to gather the full range of Lewis’s art alongside works by her contemporaries and the generations of artists she influenced. Together these 100 objects foreground Lewis’s life and work within her worlds and reveal her true mastery of marble.

With TEFAF’s funding, the Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister will restore The Boar Hunt (1616-18), a monumental painting by Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640). This work was most likely acquired directly from the artist in 1627 by George Villiers, 1st Duke of Buckingham, before becoming part of the imperial collection in Prague. In 1749, it entered the collection of Frederick Augustus IIof Saxony and has remained in Dresden ever since, surviving wartime displacement to the USSR in 1945, a decade in storage in Moscow, and eventual return to Dresden in the mid-1950s.

The Boar Hunt is obscured by a thick, darkened multi-layered varnish (likely 19th-century) that mutes Rubens’ original palette. Technical imaging has also confirmed the presence of an upper extension into which the original underdrawing does not continue, raising key questions about when the extension was made and by whom. Early evidence suggests the addition may have been made under Rubens’ direction, while ongoing research will explore possible contributions from artists in his circle, including Jan Wildens, Lucas van Uden, or Anthony van Dyck.

Christopher Baker, Committee Member said:

Claude created a deeply seductive, escapist vision of the warmth of southern Europe through his bucolic and poetic landscape paintings. This serene example, from about 1640, shows him at the height of his powers. He worked for kings, cardinals and diplomats; however, it was first recorded in the collection of a Flemish merchant in Rome and was later displayed for many years at Woburn Abbey, Bedfordshire, as part of the splendid collection of the Dukes of Bedford. Because of its transcendent beauty and fascinating history, which warrants further research, as well as the profound influence of such paintings on British taste, every effort should be made to secure it for a public collection.

This book of essays highlights the lives, careers, and works of art of women artists and artisans in Venice and its territories from the fourteenth to the eighteenth centuries. The collection represents the first fruits of an ongoing research program launched by Save Venice, Inc. Women Artists of Venice, directed by Professor Tracy Cooper of Temple University, in conjunction with a conservation program, led by Melissa Conn, Director of Save Venice, Inc. Inspired by a growing body of research that has resurrected female artists and artisans in Florence and Bologna during the last decade, the Save Venice project seeks to recover the history of women artists and artisans born or active in the Venetian republic in the early modern period. Topics include their contemporary reception — or historical silence — and current scholarship positioning them as individuals and as an underrepresented category in the history of art and cultural heritage.

While preparing for an event at the University of Sydney in 2017, a librarian turned to the back page of the library's 1497 copy of Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy and made a curious discovery. In red chalk was a drawing of a woman and baby, and an inscription in Italian:

On the day of 17th September, Giorgione of Castelfranco, a very excellent artist, died of the plague in Venice at the age of 36 and he rests in peace.

This discovery would shine the international art history spotlight on Sydney and begin a project that has seen state-of-the-art imaging techniques used alongside good old-fashioned archival research in a quest for answers.

Was the drawing on the endpaper actually by Giorgione? Was Dante his inspiration? Do we have for the first time the dates of Giorgione's birth and death? How should we reimagine Giorgione's chronology? And how did the early edition of Divine Comedy end up in Sydney?