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May 1982

Vol. 124 | No. 950

The Burlington Magazine

Editorial

The Hampton Site: New Rooms for the National Gallery

THE National Gallery report for the years 1980-81 notes the acquisition of fourteen paintings, among them major works by Altdorfer, Hals, Rubens, Claude and Degas. The pictures must be on show to the public which has bought them. This is increasingly hard to achieve in limited space, if the Gallery is to continue its admirable policy of keeping the entire collection, including the reserve, on unrestricted view. Additions to the collection are being made at about the rate of five a year. If conditions are not to be intolerable within twenty years, action must be taken soon.

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  • Front Matter

  • The Saint Anne Altar in Sant'Agostino: Restoration and Interpretation

    By Virginia Anne Bonito

    IN the December 1980 issue of THE BURLINGTON MAGAZINE, I published an account of the discovery of the architectural framework for the Saint Anne altar in Sant' Agostino, Rome. Within a year of the discovery, permission to restore the altar for a mostra was granted by the Ministero per i Beni Culturali, the Soprintendenza per i Beni Artistici e Storici di Roma, and the Soprintendenza per i Beni Architettonici del Lazio. The actual restoration of the altar began in November 1980 and was completed on 6th January 1981. In this second article on the altar, I should like to discuss the restoration, and the meaning and relationship of the compositional and iconographic programme, which I hope are evident once again as a result.

  • A Parmigianino Discovery

    By Clovis Whitfield

    VASARI begins his Life of Parmigianino by praising his invention and his ability as a landscape painter. It is a surprising tribute, for with the exception of some very poetic passages in the background of a few works, and a handful of drawings, the artist does not seem to have been a specialist of this kind. We are fortunate to be able to publish here a major masterpiece by Parmigianino which includes a breathtaking landscape view. This work, a Madonna and Child with St John and (?) the Magdalen, is a work of great perfection that belongs naturally to the artist's Bolognese years, 1527-31. This kind of subject matter was one to which Parmigianino returned frequently both in drawings and paintings. The reappearance of this picture, which has obvious links with a number of other paintings and drawings, shows that it was especially in Bologna that he worked on this theme.

  • A Recovered Work of Andrea del Sarto with Some Notes on a Leonardesque Connection

    By Sydney J. Freedberg

    THE Saint John the Baptist, now exhibited at the Worcester (Mass.) Art Museum, on loan from All Saints Church, Worcester, is a discovery only in the sense that it has not hitherto appeared in the art- historical literature. It is, rather, a recovery of a neglected work, which at the time of the first notice that survives of it was attributed to Sarto. The painting can be traced no farther than the middle of the nineteenth century: in 1863 one Peter Chardon Brooks sent it to a 'Sanitary Fair Exhibition' held at the Boston Anthenaeum, where it was entered as number 168 in the hand list (there was no proper catalogue) as a work by Sarto.

  • Picasso's 'Guernica' Installed in the Prado

    By Douglas Cooper

    ON 24th October 1981 Picasso's enormous painting Guernica was formally presented to the Spanish public for the first time. The painting was executed in May-June 1937 in the heat of emotion surrounding the Spanish Civil War, the Franco uprising and the intervention (as a gratuitously destructive element) of the Condor Legion of bombing aircraft sent by Hitler from Berlin. These were planes that, for no reason whatever, made a devastating attack on the village of Guernica, which was greatly revered by the Basques, at the end of April 1937: on 30th April a series of horrifying photographs of the results of the bombardment were published in the French press. On 1st May 1937, Picasso, touched to the quick, made a first drawing in a series which, within a week, had led him to elaborate the first version of a great symbolically enriched composition, through which he sough to express, in a visionary form, the full horror of the event in human terms. The picture that finally evolved was in no sense intended as a recreation of any scene: it was and is a denunciation of the forces of Evil, a warning of what might soon happen everywhere, unless they were condemned and destroyed. It was also an emotional outpouring of belief in and love for suffering humanity.

  • New Light on Lorenzo de' Medici's Convent at Porta San Gallo

    By F. W. Kent

    A NEW reference to Lorenzo de' Medici's convent at the San Gallo gate in Florence, attributed to Giuliano da Sangallo, at once provides us with a precise date for its inception and with other information about this intriguing building, which was destroyed during preparations for the siege of 1529-30. Ser Bartolomeo Dei, writing from Florence on 21st August 1488 to his uncle Benedetto Dei who was staying in the Mugello, informed the celebrated chronicler, in a letter otherwise devoted to Italian politics, that:

    Qua s'ordina et mura 1° nuovo munistero e religione bellissima fuor della porta a Sangallo in sul Mugnone, sotto l'ordine deli heremiti di Sancto Agostino, e Lorenzo de' Medici in buona parte fa la spesa e è auctore della muragla insieme col nostro ser Giovanni, col mezzo e colla reputatione d'un valente e buono predichatore, fra Mariano Barbetta, capo di tale conveto.

  • Titian's Drawing of a Christ Child in Ancona

    By Harold E. Wethey

    A HEAD of the Christ Child by Titian in black chalk is virtually unknown, despite its extraordinarily high quality. Its location on the back of the wooden panel on which was painted in 1520 the Ancona Madonna and Child with Saints and Alvise Gozzi as Donor, explains its lack of fame. The discovery of the existence of several drawings on the wooden panel was first made during the restorations on 1948-51. Dr Giovanni Urbani, in his report of the work undertaken in the Instituto di Restauro at Rome, published one photograph of the entire back of the panel, as well as details of the restoration of the picture itself. Although these photographs reproduced here have been in my possession since the autumn of 1963, I did not publish them in my volume, Titian, The religious Paintings but limited myself to mentioning the fact that the drawings existed and that the head of the Christ Child was possibly a study for the painting.

  • The Spinola 'Holy Family' of Giulio Romano

    By Francis Russell

    SUCH is the inevitability of certain works of art that they seem familiar, even when encountered for the first time. In the case of the Holy Family here considered, this is only partly explained by the existence of copies of the design, a picture once at Chicago and a drawing at Gijon; for it belongs inescapably to the series of Holy Families evolved by Giulio Romano in the shadow of Raphael. Its neglect by recent scholars is in fact balanced by its former reputation; for in the sale of Admiral Lord Radstock on 13th May 1826 at Christie's it fetched the then considerable sum of 890 guineas. Stated to be by Giulio Romano and to have come from the 'Vicenza Spinola Palace, at Genoa', the picture is described in the catalogue with such precision as to leave no doubt of its identity with that here published:

    THE HOLY FAMILY, consisting of Joseph and the Virgin seated before the door of a ruined Dwelling, the Infant Christ, standing, but from weakness of his frame, scarcely erect, between the knees of his mother, and the young St John in a more energetic attitude on one knee, pointing to the prophecies in an open Volume: a fine Female Figure is advancing from the right, with a basket of Turtle Doves, as the offering of Purification, while with her right hand she collects her drapery. The distance is filled with romantic Scenery.

  • Saleroom Note: An Early Drawing by Salvator Rosa, Datable to 1639

    By John T. Spike
  • London Calendar

  • Corrections to Brown and Heleniak

  • Back Matter

  • Announcements - Stolen From Urbino Cathedral