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March 2025

Vol. 167 | No. 1464

European decorative arts at the Met

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Editorial

A Frick renaissance

On 17th April 2025 the Frick Collection on Fifth Avenue re-opens after a long period of redevelopment. When an old friend has a face lift, the results can be disconcerting. Happily, the impact here is, however, reassuringly subtle – as the splendid Gilded-age character of one of New York’s iconic cultural institutions has been retained, while elegant new facilities have been deftly integrated.

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Exhibition Review

Faire parler les pierres: Sculptures médiévales de Notre-Dame

By Paul Williamson

There was a distinct atmosphere of celebration in Paris in early December 2024. A little over five years after the shocking fire of 15th April 2019, the cathedral of Notre-Dame rather miraculously reopened to the public, as President Macron had vowed the day after the conflagration. It now stands restored, cleaned both inside and out, its roof and spire rebuilt, and the exhibition under review was planned to coincide with this new phase of the cathedral’s life.

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  • Marriage of the Virgin, from the Borromeo Book of Hours

    Cristoforo de Predis at the Sforza Court

    By Jeffrey Schrader
    An analysis of the signatures of the Renaissance miniaturist Cristoforo de Predis on four manuscript folios demonstrates that the artist signalled the fact that he was mute in order to align his achievements with those of Quintus Pedius, a mute painter from Antiquity, whose disability was described in a eulogy by Pliny the Elder. De Predis was thus able to enhance both his status and that of the Sforza dukes, whose patronage he enjoyed in Milan.
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  • X-radiograph of Portrait of a woman in a green dress

    A portrait of an unknown woman by Titian

    By Peter Humfrey,Paul Joannides
    The vast majority of representations of women painted by Titian are mythological or allegorical figures – there are very few portraits firmly attributed to the artist. Stylistic analysis and technical evidence arising from the conservation of a portrait of an unknown woman undertaken by the Hamilton Kerr Institute, Cambridge, strongly suggest that the painting is the work of Titian.
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  • Teresa, or Teresia Sampsonia, Lady Shirley

    A Safavid ambassadress in Rome: the last testament of Teresa Sampsonia Shirley

    By Alexandria Brown-Hedjazi
    Teresa Sampsonia Shirley, a Circassian noblewoman from the Safavid Empire, conducted diplomatic business across Europe alongside her husband, the English-born Safavid ambassador Robert Shirley. Her last testament, published here for the first time, provides valuable insights into her later and more modest life in Rome, where she lived after the death of her husband.
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  • Sleeping Mars

    Additions to Ter Brugghen in Italy: ‘Christ bound to the column’ and ‘St John the Baptist in the wilderness’

    By John Gash
    ‘Christ bound to the column’ by Hendrick Ter Brugghen, published here for the first time, was recorded in a 1638 inventory of the collection of Vincenzo Giustiniani in Rome, where it was displayed with a ‘Denial of St Peter’, also probably by the artist. These two works, as well as the recently discovered ‘St John the Baptist in the wilderness’, date from Ter Brugghen’s Italian period.
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  • Two boys with a bladder

    ‘Two boys with a bladder’ in the J. Paul Getty Museum and Joseph Wright of Derby’s early candlelights

    By Julia Siemon
    A careful re-assessment of Joseph Wright of Derby’s painting of ‘Two boys with a bladder’ in the Getty’s collection, supported by documentary discoveries, clarifies the circumstances of the painting’s creation and first exhibition and has significant implications for dating several of the artist’s other painted and drawn works.
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  • The iron forge (incorrectly titled Aber Glaslyn in the county of Merioneth)

    Paul Sandby and Sir Watkin Williams-Wynn revisited

    By Oliver Fairclough

    In an article in this Magazine in 1972 Peter Hughes demonstrated that Paul Sandby’s aquatints ‘XII Views in North Wales’ (1776) depict scenes on a journey undertaken with Sir Watkin Williams-Wynn (1749–89) in 1771. Hughes’s article remains the definitive account of this first Picturesque tour of Wales, but the acquisition by Amgueddfa Cymru – Museum Wales of twenty-one previously unknown views by Sandby has prompted renewed research into the relationship between the artist and his patron. These works passed by descent from Sir Watkin’s second son, thereby escaping the fire that in 1858 devasted Wynnstay, the Williams-Wynn seat in Denbighshire.

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  • Detail of the digital X-radiograph of Blue boy (after treatment)

    Observations about the abandoned portrait beneath Gainsborough’s ‘Blue boy’

    By Christina Milton O'Connell
    The first glimpse beneath the surface of Thomas Gainsborough’s ‘Blue boy’ in the collection of the Huntington Library and Art Museum, San Marino, occurred in 1938, during an investigation of what was believed to be a pentimento at the top centre of the canvas. However, this examination revealed something completely different: an abandoned portrait of a man, revealing that Gainsborough (1727–88) painted the ‘Blue boy’ on a reused canvas.
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  • Drawing the Italian Renaissance Italian Renaissance Drawings from Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen

    By Catherine Whistler
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  • Faire parler les pierres: Sculptures médiévales de Notre-Dame

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  • Medieval Women: In Their Own Words

    By Diane Antille
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  • Carpaccio, Bellini and the Early Renaissance in Venice

    By Irene Brooke
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  • Dans l’atelier de Guido Reni

    By Catherine R. Puglisi
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  • Leighton and Landscape: Impressions from Nature

    By Christopher Baker
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  • Jugendstil: Made in Munich

    By Sabine Wieber
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  • Winifred Nicholson: Cumbrian Rag Rugs

    By Helen Wyld
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  • The History of Department Stores: From 1850 to Nowadays

    By Catherine Croft
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  • Fracta Doces: Thirteenth-Century Insular Visitors to Rome

    By Sible L. de Blaauw
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