Burlington Contemporary is the Burlington Magazine’s free online platform for reviews and research on international contemporary art.
Burlington Contemporary is the Burlington Magazine’s free online platform for reviews and research on international contemporary art.
It was announced on 19th January that a licence to export the Warwick Vase was to be withheld for four months. If a public collection in the United Kingdom offers to buy it before midnight on 18th May 1979, an export permit will not be granted. The Reviewing Committee on the Export of Works of Art has in fact declared the Vase to be a work of national importance, measured by the criteria of the Waverly Report.
Within recent years studies by John Flemming and Eugenio Riccomini have drawn attention to the work of Giuseppe Mazza, the leading Bolognese sculptor of the period around 1700. The majority of surviving sculptures by Mazza are of religious works but a number of secular works are mentioned by his biographer Giampietro Zanotti whose Storia dell' Accademia Clementina constitutes the primary source for the artist's career.
Our knowledge of the work of Tommaso Manzuoli (called Maso da San San Friano after the popular quarter of Florence where he was born) has steadily improved thanks to Luciano Berti's article of 1963, followed by Peter Cannon- Brooke's researches and Catherine Monbeig- Goguel's publication of drawings in the Cabinet de Dessins at the Louvre, and as result Maso has rightly come to be considered one of the chief representatives of the last stage of Florentine Mannerism, the period which closes with the paintings in the Studiolo in which refined allegory finds bizarre and fantastic expression.
The title of this article should really read 'Thrice more Elsheimer', for I should like to introduce to readers of THE BURLINGTON MAGAZINE two paintings by the artist that have been recovered last year - almost like a present for the commemoration of the 400th anniversary of Elsheimer's birth. I would also like to suggest a possible solution for the subject of one of the drawings.
The current revaluation of Carlo Dolci's contribution to seventeenth-century painting arises mainly from the increasing exposure being given to fine originals by him, as opposed to the hearsay reputation based principally on studio variants of his more popular images. It seems safe to assume that the climate of taste is sufficiently altered in Dolci's favour to prevent a recurrence of the situation, which permitted the wilful destruction of one of his most important - and to judge by photographs of the surviving fragment - most beautiful, altar pieces after its sale from the Darnley Collection at Cobham Hall in 1957.
Of Pietro da Cortona's major pupils - Giovanni Francesco Romanelli (1610-1662), Guglielmo Cortese (1628-1679), Ciro Ferri (1634- 1689) and Lazzaro Baldi (1624- 1703) - the last mentioned has probably been the least studied. Few seem prepared to take his work seriously, and it has to be admitted that the most frequently cited characteristic of his painting, a slightly grotesque facial type, broad nosed, big-eyed and narrow-browed, a distortion of the similar but more finely-wrought features of the monumental figures in in Cortona's late paintings, far from being attractive, is at times slightly ridiculous.
During his years as the chief architect of St Mark's, Jacopo Sansovino effectively recast the choir of the ancient basilica in a more contemporary mould. In doing so, he created some of the most important sculpture of his Venetian career: the bronze relief of the life and miracles of St Mark for the tribunes; the four statuettes of the evangelists for the high altar; the bronze sacristy door and the small relief for the altar of the sacrament.
The tragic death of Tom Wragg has come as a sad blow to many who, having first met him through a professional interest as art historians in some part of the collection at Chatsworth, subsequently became his friends.
It has been said of historians - and we may with even greater justice say it of historians of art - that they are of two kinds, the generalisateurs ( to use Jacob Burckhardt's disdainful expression) and the particularizers. This is, of course, a generalization, but it is one particularly useful to parlicularizers when they want to tease the generalisateurs ( who never tease) . What a gift to both these camps was the philosophy of Hegel! The pattern of successful generalization was given by the master; it could be expanded at will as one named or discovered new civilizations and styles. The generalizations ruled, but they had to be filled in with facts. That later task satisfied the diligent among the particularizers and even brought out the particularizer in the generalisateur.
generalisateur.The sub-title does less than justice to this very important book. The second and longer part is indeed an exemplary catalogue of some 800 items; but the first part is an analysis of the free-standing sculpture from the Mausoleum, and of the evidence for its position on the building and for its importance in the under-standing of the monument as a whole, which puts the subject on an entirely new footing.
This is a very special work in a very special field. It is special because the great majority of these temples in the Northern portion of India are small and known only , outside the Archaeological Survey of India, to a tiny group of experts.
As Mr Lucie-Smith notes in his opening sentence, Fantin-Latour is both well known and little known, sought after and yet not seriously studied.
