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.
In February 1932 Samuel Courtauld transferred his Portman Square house and part of his art collection to the Home House Society and, as part of the University of London, the Courtauld Institute of Art opened there in October 1932.' This unusual beginning in private benefaction has continued with further important bequests which have greatly enriched the collection, but the Institute itself has recently come to be seen as anomalous by the central University of London, to whose statutes and numerous committees the Courtauld was subject. In the 1980s and 1990s there was also a perceptible slide from the pinnacle, not only because there were other excellent places in the UK to study art history: although its graduates still obtained top positions throughout the country, one wondered whether the Courtauld was, perhaps, resting on its laurels. Response to dramatic changes in expectations was slow and student IT provision, for example, was inadequate throughout most of the 1990s.
The purpose of this article is to illustrate and analyse the spectacular underdrawing revealed by means of infra-red reflectography beneath Pontormo's Joseph with Jacob in Egypt in the National Gallery. The reflectogram provides a unique insight into the preparatory processes behind this painting, of all the more value since very few independent drawings for it survive. It has furthermore prompted us to suggest the connexion of a study by Pontormo in the Uffizi, not previously related to Joseph with Jacob in Egypt. We will touch briefly on the underdrawing exposed by the same method in the other panels by Pontormo for the Borgherini project, and suggest some unremarked formal borrowings from the engravings of the Netherlandish print-maker Lucas van Leyden.
For two and a half centuries, from 1600 to 1850, any traveller in Venice who wished to admire Titian's paintings would have visited the Palazzo Barbarigo della Terrazza on the Canal Grande at S. Polo, believed to contain the contents of the artist's studio when he died, including the painting discussed here.' In 1613, Gregorio Barbarigo (shortly afterwards Venetian ambassador in London) accompanied Lord and Lady Arundel during a fortnight's stay in Venice, when he took them to 'a feast in the Arsenal, a banquet in a gallie, entertainment in divers palaces of particular gentlemen by license of the State'.2 Some scholars argue that Arundel's taste for late Titian and his purchase of the Flaying of Marsyas were stimulated by the 'unfinished' pictures in the Barbarigo collection.3 In 1623, Van Dyck made a list of Venetian collections and dealers on a page of his Italian Sketchbook, now in the British Museum.4 He mentions the Barbarigo collection in this list, opposite a drawing after a painting of Venus looking at herself in a mirror, which is similar but not the same as the Venus with a mirror in Washington with a Barbarigo provenance (Figs.28 and 29).'
Venice is well known to have been an important centre for the pigment trade during the later Middle Ages and the renaissance.' Painters and agents regularly travelled to the city to purchase colours, even though common pigments were often available locally.2 This preference for Venetian products has been attributed to higher quality, lower prices, and to the city's reputation as an emporium of a wide variety of luxury goods, particu larly 'oltremare da venecia' - lapis lazuli imported from the mines of Badakshan, first described by the most famous of all Venetian merchants, Marco Polo.3 It has always been assumed that foreigners and Venetians alike purchased pigments and other supplies in Venice from non- medicinal apothecaries (called spezieri da grosso in Venice), as was the case in other artistic centres on the peninsula such as Florence and Rome where apothecaries sold a bewildering variety of wares for an even wider range of uses.4
'When my body is separated from this life, I want it robed in the habit of the Scuola of St Mark, where I am a brother, and brought to the monastery of S. Andrea del Lido and buried there in our Chapel of St Mary, built by us in that place .. .." In this passage from his will of March 1465, Procurator of St Mark's, Domenico Diedo, emphasised his agency in the construction of a funerary chapel dedicated to the Madonna at the island monastery of S. Andrea del Lido or Certosa in Venice. Diedo's personal account book, which he mentioned in his will,2 also asserts his juspatronatus of, and responsibility for, 'the Chapel at S. Andrea del Lido, made in my name, by me Domengo Diedo, in the name of Madonna St Mary'.3 The account book includes payments made by Diedo for the erection of the chapel at the Certosa and for various fixtures and liturgical items including a carved wooden portal, an oil lamp, an altar-cloth ('paramento dell'alltare') embroidered in gold thread ('fuxi' or fixi doro'), a gold cross, an altar-piece ('anchona') and its painted cover ('chortina').4 Several payments were made to craftsmen, including the unnamed 'master of the anchona' in the years 1463-64.5 The purpose of this article is to present the overwhelming evidence which identifies the anchona commissioned by Diedo as the highly praised Polyptych of the Madonna in the Accademia, Venice, by Bartolomeo Vivarini (Fig.42), the first major surviving independent work by this artist, sometimes erroneously called the 'Morosini polyptych'.6 The Diedo account book represents the only significant contemporary documentation for an extant Venetian work by Bartolomeo Vivarini.7
Domenico di Francesco d'Antonio, better known during his life and subsequently as Domenico di Michelino (1417-91), has often been judged as less of a masterly painter than a 'master of the painting trade' - an artistically limited but prolific painter-artisan, producing standardised imagery. Although Domenico's art was essentially that of a follower rather than a harbinger of a new style, a closer look at his career suggests a keen commercial awareness, a quality further underlined by Domenico's collaboration with his more accomplished contemporaries Benozzo Gozzoli and Alesso Baldovinetti. A documented arbitration dispute of 1483 not only records two late paintings commissioned from Domenico by the prominent Cavalcanti family, but also succeeds in humanising the ageing Domenico as both an artist and a practical business man.
