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.
AMONG the many questions arising from the sad history of the sale of the Chatsworth drawings, perhaps the most pressing is that of the role played by the Trustees of the British Museum. The failure of the Museum to secure these drawings - of such quality and such historic importance - may have been unavoidable. On the information now available, however, we are not in a position to decide whether all appropriate steps were in fact taken, or whether a serious blunder occurred. The letter which we publish on p.569 of this issue is an appeal to the Trustees to give a full account to the public of their dealings. It is to be hoped that the gravity of the issues will in this instance outweigh a natural desire for discretion.
NICOLAES Maes (1634-93) was one of Rembrandt's most gifted pupils. While his reputation rests securely on the restrained pictorial beauty and humane qualities of his domestic genre scenes and on the technical skill and compelling characterisations of his portraits, recent acquisitions by north American collections have enriched our understanding of Maes's considerable achievement as a painter of religious subjects.
THE dramatic fate, 'mostruoso infelice', of Guido Reni's late large-scale painting of Bacchus and Ariadne has been long known to us through Félibien's account. The painting, commissioned by Queen Henrietta Maria through the mediation of Cardinal Francesco Barberini, had found its way into the collection of Mazarin's contròleur général des finances, Michel Particelli d'Emery. Félibien relates how the painting came to be destroyed by d'Emery's widow shortly after the financier's death.
IN Brazil, the British visitor who is familiar with the archi-tecture of Robert Adam may get a surprise if he visits the Zoo at Rio de Janeiro. There is something familiar, surely, about that gateway and screen of columns (Figs.9,12)? Indeed there is. It is a copy of the Adam screen at the Brentford Road entrance to Syon House (Figs.10,13). How it came to Rio is a complicated story which is worth unravelling, and it begins in Portugal in the 1790s.
A MAGNIFICENT bronze statuette of Louis XIII (1601-43) has recently appeared on the London art market (Figs.14, 15, 17, 19, 21). The identity of its subject is beyond doubt: apart from the crowned initial L on the harness at the mount's forehead and the fleur-de-lys appearing on the harness, saddle-cloth and cloak, the bony features are those of Louis XIII in his late thirties (i.e. between about 1635 and his death in 1643), as seen on coins and medals by Jean Warin and on his bust of the king in the Louvre (Fig.16). The only other surviving equestrian statuettes are those showing him much earlier in life (c. 1615-25) by Hubert le Sueur.
THE scene of Christ in Majesty on the Day ofJudgment which hangs on the wall behind the woman holding a balance in Vermeer's painting in the National Gallery of Art, Washington (Fig.22) has long been regarded as the key to the significance of this work. Most commentators assume that a thematic parallel exists between the subject of the painting within the painting and the activity of the woman with the balance. Her preoccupation with gold and pearls, interpreted as representative of life's vanities, is contrasted by the majority of writers with the weighing of souls at the Last Judgment. Whether or not the woman is interpreted as being oblivious of eternal values, the painting is usually seen as having a vanitas theme and therefore as a moral reminder of the soul's peril.
HISTORIANS, when attempting to shed light on Goya's first period of creativity, from his early years until the second half of 1771, the date of his return from Rome, have gradually come to realise that he owed a greater debt to Giaquinto than to Tiepolo.
SEURAT'S seascape has not received the critical attention that it deserves as a part of his production equal in importance to the figure-painting. In particular, there has been no extended attempt to define the nature of the relationship between his works conceived en plein air and the motifs which provide their starting points.
