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 MAY SEEM ill-advised, even tasteless, to consider the future of the Royal Academy of Arts just as, once more, it is experiencing unwelcome headlines in the press. But the current health of the institution, in spite of its being a private, charitable body, is a legitimate focus of concern: since its foundation in 1768 the Academy has been tied to the development of British art and occupies a prominent role in national cultural life. Seven years ago the Academy suffered a blow when embezzlement on a Trollopian scale was discovered. Now it is claimed that about £80,000 has 'disappeared' from an unauthorised bank account set up to help students at the Academy's Schools, a cornerstone of the institution's structure, and an investigation, ordered by the Charity Commission, is currently underway. Recently, internal disagreements and an exhibitions programme in some disarray have contributed to the public perception of a faltering organisation pincered between its long-held independence and the exigencies of running a successful business.
IT IS NOT UNCOMMON for craftsmen to reproduce patterns designed for expensive materials using cheaper ones. Frequently unaware of what they are reproducing, or inspired by derivatives rather than the original, they may introduce their own peculiar renditions leading to additional corruptions and misinterpretations. This process can reduce a narrative to a series of unconnected images.
A case in point is the transfer from silk to cotton of images from two monumental silk tablet-woven hangings, panels from which were carried to England following Lord Napier's punitive expedition to Ethiopia in 1868.
THE FIRST PART of this study reconstructed the appearance of the tapestry series from which the partial sets of the 'double-chariot' Triumphs of Petrarch, now at Hampton Court Palace and the Victoria and Albert Museum, originate. It suggested that the series was conceived and first woven for Louis XII of France around 1507, the date that appears on one of the Victoria and Albert tapestries and which probably corresponds to the date of the creation of the cartoons.
REVIEWING THE SALON of 1863, Théophile Gautier remarked upon the lack of public interest in history painting:
Once, it was the large history paintings that attracted first and foremost the gaze of the public at the Salon: genre paintings came only second. Today little attention is paid to the huge canvases, and the visitors leaning on the separation rails to study some microscopic subject only very rarely look up at the lofty regions where the historical and religious paintings languish. The crowd is visibly bored by serious art, and at the very most it grants those who practise it the cold and banal esteem that cannot be refused to useless dedication.
