Burlington Contemporary is the Burlington Magazine’s free online platform for reviews and research on international contemporary art.
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Burlington Contemporary is the Burlington Magazine’s free online platform for reviews and research on international contemporary art.
EVERY FEW YEARS since the 1950s this Magazine has carried an Editorial bewailing the growing surfeit of exhibitions and flagging the contingent implications for museums, the media, the public and, above all, the works of art themselves. None of these jeremiads is likely to have had the slightest effect on the seemingly unstoppable circus of international shows. To address the subject once more may seem a futile gesture in the face of this fait accompli. But the pressures brought to bear on institutions to mount shows and the curatorial slavery this entails cannot be underestimated. The huge number of new 'wings' and temporary exhibition spaces that have opened int he last few years all demand to be filled.
THERE IS NO need to wonder about Federico Barocci's extraordinary reputation during his lifetime, a reputation that led to invitations to work for the courts of Francesco I de' Medici in Florence, Rudolph II in Prague and Phillip II in Madrid. It also earned him a conspicuous place in Bellori's Lives where his biography follows that of Domenico Fontana and precedes Caravaggio's. In organising the Lives, Bellori clearly intended the diligent study that underlies Barocci's refined sense of beauty, his compositional inventiveness and his exquisite colouring to serve both as a contrast with, and a critique of, Caravaggio's manner of painting without proper consideration ('senza disegno') and his over-strong dependence on working from a posed model.
NEWLY DISCOVERED CORRESPONDENCE between the Florentine physician and antiquary Alessandro Foresi (1814-88) and the French connoisseur and collector baron Charles Davillier (1823-83) helps to identify an important work by the nineteenth-century Florentine sculptor Giovanni Bastianini (1830-68). The work in question is a terracotta figure of Giovanni delle Bande Nere in the Wallace Collection, London, hitherto regarded as an extremely rare bozzetto for a monumental Italian Renaissance portrait sculpture.
