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February 1998

Vol. 140 | No. 1139

The Burlington Magazine

Editorial

Access to Museums

The debate about free admission to public museums and galleries in the UK came to a head once again last autumn. There had been growing fears that the trustees of the British Museum, after a year of anxious self-inspection since the review of its operations and management (see the Editorial in the December 1996 issue), would feel compelled to introduce charges in order to meet its mounting deficit. Hopes were fading that the Labour party's pre-election pledges of support for free admission would be translated into financial action, as they came up against the much tougher promise to stick within the previous government's spending limits. Since the election yet another national museum has succumbed, the trustees of the National Museums of Scotland announcing in October entrance charges to the Royal Museum of Scotland to take force from the New Year, while expressing their belief that 'the collections should, ideally, be freely available to anyone who wishes to see them'. If the British Museum were to follow suit, how much longer could the few remaining free national museums - the National Gallery, the Tate, the National Portrait Gallery and the National Galleries of Scotland - hold out? And would the even harder pressed regional museums be able to maintain a principle that had been abandoned at national level?

 

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  • The Design and Building of the Gothic Folly at Wimpole, Cambridgeshire

    By David Adshead

    An engraved view of the 'Gothic Tower At Wimple', published anonymously in 1777, carries beneath it a four stanza verse which might easily be dismissed as frivolous doggerel, typical of the eighteenth-century vogue for Gothick poetry (Fig. 1).' Artless it may be, but this mock-elegy for a glorious medieval past does much to explain why ruinous architecture so appealed to the aristocrats and antiquaries of the age. The verse demonstrates a delight in the so-called 'Theory of Association', by which architecture could be invested with moral or political significance and linked with historical or imaginary events.'

     

  • Charles Heathcote Tatham and the Accademia di S. Luca, Rome

    By Frank Salmon

    In the late spring of 1796, with Napoleon's armies already occupying parts of northern Italy, the English architectural student Charles Heathcote Tatham was in the process of organising his election to the Accademia di S. Luca in Rome prior to his hurried departure from the city. By seeking affiliation with an Italian fine arts academy, Tatham was following in the footsteps of a number of British students who had visited Italy in the second half of the eighteenth century, but the nature of such Italian academic membership remains widely misunderstood.' In the latest edition of the standard history of British architecture in this period, for example, it is stated that 'from Adam to Soane there is a continuous tradition of participation by young Britons in the current architectural thought of the Italian academies'.2 Tatham's case, which is by far the best documented, suggests that such memberships were in fact conceived by British architects almost entirely in terms of the honorary status and self-publicity they conferred at a time of emerging professionalism. The particular circumstances of Tatham's election in Rome also illuminate the uncertain relationship which existed between an historic Italian academy and more recently founded British fine arts institutions, such as the Royal Academy and the Architects' Club. Moreover, a broader survey of the records of the Accademia di S. Luca suggests that Tatham's dealings with the institution were typical of those of British later eight- eenth-century artists.

     

  • Still-Life Mezzotints by Robert Robinson

    By James A. Ganz
  • An English Gentleman Painter, Henry Gibbs

    By Karen Hearn

    The recent acquisition by the Tate Gallery of a mid-seventeenth century history painting showing Aeneas and his family fleeing Troy (Fig.31),' marks the discovery of a previously unrecorded English painter. The canvas is signed 'Hnry Gibbs fecit/1654' on the base of the centre column (Fig.29). Although there are various seventeenth-century references to artists surnamed Gibbs connected with the county of Kent, none called Henry had come to the attention of art historians until now.2

     

  • The Collections of Cardinal Benedetto Giustiniani. Part II

    By Silvia Danesi Squarzina

    In Part I of this article I published and analysed the 1600 and 1621 inventories of Cardinal Benedetto Giustiniani, newly identifying some of the paintings, and linking others more securely with Benedetto's patronage. In this second part, my aim is to make a contribution towards defining the character and taste of Benedetto Giustiniani, differentiating him from his brother Vincenzo and revealing the coexistence of different strands of motivation and intention in Roman patronage in the first twenty years of the seventeenth century.

     

  • Otto van Veen, Cosimo Masi and the Art Market in Antwerp at the End of the Sixteenth Century

    By Giuseppe Bertini

    The death of Alessandro Farnese, Duke of Parma and Governor of the Netherlands, on the night of 2nd-3rd December 1592 did not bring to an end the connexions between his court painter Otto van Veen and his secretary Cosimo Masi. Their continued relationship has been known through a letter of 21st February 1595 from the painter in Antwerp to Masi, who had obtained permission some months earlier to leave Flanders;' in it Van Veen confirms his undertaking to execute an altar-piece for the Masi family chapel in the church of S. Giovanni Evangelista at Parma, a commission for which he had already received an initial payment.2

     

  • The Provenance of the 'Castle Howard' Version of Orazio Gentileschi's 'Finding of Moses'

    By Hilary Maddicott

    Although it has generally been accepted that Orazio Gentileschi's Finding of Moses recently sold from Castle Howard (Fig.57) is the painting recorded at the Queen's House in Greenwich in 1633/34, its whereabouts during the latter half of the seventeenth century has remained unresolved.' It is now possible to provide a complete account of its history, which also helps to illuminate patterns of patronage and collecting at the court of Charles I and during the Commonwealth.

     

  • Michael Jaffé (1923-97)

    By Duncan Robinson