Exhibition | On a Pedestal
Alessandro Galilei and Edward Lovett Pearce, Castletown House, Celbridge, County Kildare, ca. 1722–29, built for William Conolly, Speaker of the Irish House of Commons; extensive rennovations were made by Lady Louisa Conolly starting in 1759 (Photo: Wikimedia Commons).
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Now on view at Castletown:
On a Pedestal: Celebrating the Contemporary Portrait Bust
Castletown House, Celbridge, County Kildare, 1 July – 31 August 2018
Dublin Castle, 8 September — 4 November 2018
Curated by Mary Heffernan, Hélène Bremer, and Nuala Goodman
Inspired by the classical busts in Castletown’s Long Gallery, this exhibition brings together works from an international group of contemporary artists who explore the genre of the portrait bust in a variety of media: from wood to stone, from marble to ceramics, from stainless steel to more ephemeral materials such as sugar. Initiating a dialogue between past and present, classic and modern art, the diversity of materials and techniques used by the artists represented in the exhibition will inspire visitors this summer.
Among those included in the exhibition are Irish artists Ursula Burke, Janet Mullarney and Kevin Francis Gray. International artists include Sir Tony Cragg, Giulio Paolini, and Ah Xian. Curated by Mary Heffernan, General Manager Castletown House; Helene Bremer, Dutch art historian and curator; and Nuala Goodman, Milan-based Irish artist and curator.
Mary Heffernan, Hélène Bremer, and Nuala Goodman, eds., On a Pedestal: Celebrating the Contemporary Portrait Bust in the 21st Century (Dublin: Office of Public Works, 2018), 95 pages, ISBN: 978-1406429862.
Installation view of the exhibition On a Pedestal: Celebrating the Contemporary Portrait Bust at Castletown House.
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From Aidan Dunne’s article for The Irish Times (3 July 2018). . .
This year, observes Mary Heffernan, the general manager of Castletown House, is the 275th anniversary of the birth of “the great heroine of the story of Castletown,” Lady Louisa Connolly. On a Pedestal, an exhibition of portrait busts at Castletown, is intended as an homage to Louisa, and “the magical Long Gallery she created.”
Anne Valerie Dupond, ‘Lady Louisa Connolly’, 2018.
In 1743 Louisa was born into privileged circumstances: her father was the second Duke of Richmond, and her childhood was spent in great houses, including Richmond House in Whitehall, Goodwood House in Sussex and, after her parents died within a year of each other, Carton House in Co Kildare. She married Thomas Connolly of Castletown, the wealthiest man in Ireland, in 1758.
Inspired by the many houses she knew and loved, she set about making changes to Castletown, including a new cantilevered staircase, La Franchini plasterwork, the print room, diningroom and the Long Gallery. The gallery, which she referred to as her livingroom, housed her library with busts and murals of classical writers, philosophers, gods and goddesses, including the nine muses. Compare it to the collection in the Long Gallery in Trinity College Dublin, initiated in 1743, which historian Hélène Bremer describes as the most significant single influence on Louisa’s project .…
The full article is available here»
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Note (added 24 August 2018) — The original posting did not include details of the catalogue.
Exhibition | Woven Strands: The Art of Human Hair Work
The exhibition, now on view at The Mütter Museum, presents mainly nineteenth-century objects, though there are several striking eighteenth-century works, too; it’s a fascinating exploration of palette, table work, dissolving hair, and gimp techniques.
Woven Strands: The Art of Human Hair Work
The Mütter Museum, The College of Physicians of Philadelphia, 19 January — 16 September 2018
Curated by Emily Snedden Yates, John Whitenight, and Evan Michelson
A favored folk art of the 18th and 19th centuries, hair art was a sentimental expression of grief and love, usually created by women whose identities have become anonymous over time. Human hair—from both living and deceased persons—was used to form flower bouquets, wreaths, braided jewelry chains, weeping willows, and painted scenes of mourning. Considered to be a form of portraiture, these were cherished tokens to preserve the memory of a deceased loved one, chart a vibrant family tree of the living, or to be traded as friendship keepsakes. It is rare to view such pieces publicly as they were created in domestic settings, for home display. Drawing from six private collections, the Mutter Museum together with John Whitenight and Evan Michelson has assembled an exquisite group of hair art and jewelry as well as accompanying materials that discuss the social expectations of Victorian-era mourning rituals that ruled 19th-century society with strict standards.
A Brief History of Hair Art as Seen in Woven Strands: The Art of Human Hair Work at the Mütter Museum (Philadelphia: Mütter Museum, 2018), 80 pages, $17.
New Book | Chippendale’s Classic Marquetry Revealed
From Jack Metcalfe’s website, Marquetry Matters:
Jack Metcalfe, Chippendale’s Classic Marquetry Revealed (CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2018), 304 pages, ISBN: 978-1720881131, $65.
In this lavishly illustrated, wide-ranging volume, expert marqueteur Jack Metcalfe gives fascinating insights into all aspects of eighteenth-century marquetry, gained from close first-hand examination of Chippendale’s original pieces. Using his insider’s knowledge and skills as a practitioner, he investigates the materials, dyes, tools, and techniques used to create Chippendale’s polychromatic pieces. With its lively, engaging narrative and over 700 colour images, this book is essential reading for marqueteurs, cabinet makers, dyers, furniture historians, and anyone interested in the work of Britain’s supreme furniture maker, Thomas Chippendale.
Separate chapters cover:
• Materials and tools used in Chippendale’s time
• Techniques of eighteenth-century marquetry
• Dyes and dyeing techniques, including the scientific analysis of dyes used on Chippendale’s furniture
• Detailed step-by-step descriptions of the construction of three replica pieces by the author
• A detailed illustrated gallery of all the known marquetry commissions made by Thomas Chippendale.
With over 20 years’ experience as a marqueteur, Jack Metcalfe has devoted himself to uncovering and mastering the techniques of marquetry as practised by Chippendale’s skilled artisans in the eighteenth century. Using equipment, materials, dyes and techniques as close to the original as possible, Jack has created striking replicas of marquetry panels from Chippendale furniture, including the famous Diana and Minerva Commode. His careful research into the use of dyes, including ground-breaking scientific analysis of coloured veneers used, has enabled him to reveal the often startlingly fresh colours that Chippendale’s furniture would have displayed when first constructed.
The Burlington Magazine, July 2018
The eighteenth century in The Burlington:
The Burlington Magazine 160 (July 2018)
E D I T O R I A L
• Michael Hall, “At the Royal Academy of Arts,” p. 535. This is the Royal Academy’s year. The venerable London institution has celebrated its 250th anniversary by unveiling a redevelopment that has added seventy per cent more public space, staging a Summer Exhibition that has garnered five-star reviews, mounting an exhibition, The Great Spectacle, which traces the history of the annual exhibition since its inception in 1768, and publishing a monumental multi-author history of itself and its collections. . . .
A R T I C L E S
• Dorothea Diemer and Linda Hinners, “‘Gerhardt Meyer Made Me in Stockholm’: A Bronze ‘Bathing Woman’ after Giambologna,” pp. 545–53. Spurred by rivalry with French founders working for the Swedish Crown, in 1697 Gerhardt Meyer the Elder cast a bronze figure of a nude woman after a marble by Giambologna that had been in Sweden since 1632. It is inscribed ‘Me fecit Gerhardt Meyer Holmiae’.
R E V I E W S
• Laurel O. Peterson, Review of the exhibition Visitors to Versailles, 1682–1789 (Château de Versailles, 2017–18; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2018), pp. 582–84.
• Louis Cellauro and Gilbert Richaud, Review of the exhibition Jacques-François Blondel: An Enlightenment Architect in Metz (The Arsenal, Metz, 2018), pp. 584–86.
• Paul Taylor, Review of Susanna Berger, The Art of Philosophy: Visual Thinking in Europe from the Late Renaissance to the Early Enlightenment (Princeton University Press, 2017), pp. 606–07.
• Gauvin Alexander Bailey, Review of the exhibition catalogue, Ilona Katzew, ed., Painted in Mexico / Pintado en México, 1700–1790: Pinxit Mexici (Prestel, 2017), pp. 607–08.
• Sophie Littlewood, Review of Donald J. La Rocca, How to Read European Armor (Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 2017), p. 613.
O B I T U A R I E S
• Andrew Wilton, Obituary of Malcolm Cormack (1935–2018), p. 617. When the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, opened in 1977, Malcolm Cormack was its first Curator of Paintings. At Yale, and subsequently at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, he staged influential exhibitions on subjects ranging from William Blake to the Camden Town Group.
New Book | St Paul’s outside the Walls
From Cambridge UP:
Nicola Camerlenghi, St Paul’s outside the Walls: A Roman Basilica, from Antiquity to the Modern Era (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 350 pages, ISBN: 9781108429511, $125.
This volume examines one of Rome’s most influential churches: the principal basilica dedicated to St Paul. Nicola Camerlenghi traces nearly two thousand years of physical transformations to the church, from before its construction in the fourth century, to its reconstruction following a fire in 1823. By recounting this long history, he restores the building to its rightful place as a central, active participant in epochal political and religious shifts in Rome and across Christendom, as well as a protagonist in western art and architectural history. Camerlenghi also examines how buildings in general trigger memories and anchor meaning, and how and why buildings endure, evolve and remain relevant in cultural contexts far removed from the moment of their inception. At its core, Saint Paul exemplifies the concept of building as process, not product: a process deeply interlinked with religion, institutions, history, cultural memory and the arts. This study also includes state-of-the-art digital reconstructions synthesizing a wealth of historical evidence to visualize and analyze the earlier (now lost) stages of the building’s history, offering glimpses into heretofore unexamined parts of its long, rich life.
Nicola Camerlenghi is Assistant Professor of Art History at Dartmouth College, New Hampshire. A native of Italy and Switzerland, he has been a fellow at the Bibliotheca Hertziana and the Swiss Institute in Rome. His collaborative projects in the Digital Humanities have been awarded grants from the Kress Foundation.
C O N T E N T S
1 Paul’s Place in Rome: Tomb, Trophy, and the Basilica of the Constantinian Dynasty, ca. 67–386
2 The Basilica of the Theodosian Dynasty, 386–410
3 The Early Transformations, 410–700
4 A Fortress of Faith during the Heart of the Middle Ages, 700–1050
5 The Advent, Apogee, and End of St Paul’s Golden Age, 1050–1423
6 Rebirth and Modernization, 1423–1655
7 Restoring and Reconstructing St Paul’s during the Long Eighteenth Century, 1655–1823
Epilogue: The Basilica Is Dead, Long Live the Basilica!
Appendix A Reconciling the Evidence and Making the Model
Appendix B Carolingian-era Patronage
Exhibition | Herculaneum and Pompeii: Visions of a Discovery
Exhibition formerly in Chiasso, now on view at the National Archaeological Museum in Naples (MANN):
Herculaneum and Pompeii: Visions of a Discovery
m.a.x. Museum, Chiasso, Switzerland, 25 February — 6 May 2018
Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli, 28 June — 30 September 2018
Curated by Pietro Giovanni Guzzo, Maria Rosaria Esposito, and Nicoletta Ossanna Cavadini
The 280th anniversary of the discovery of Herculaneum and the 270th anniversary of that of Pompeii are here celebrated with a completely original approach, by exploring the media and the methods with which the discoveries of the two sites were communicated through the visionary expressions of those who immediately intuited the implications of the discoveries and sought to promote the progress of the excavations and research into them. From the late eighteenth century to the early twentieth, from Goethe to Stendhal, William Gell, Giovanni Battista and Francesco Piranesi, and many drafters, engravers, and lovers of antiquity down to the Alinari brothers, this is an account of the passion for the excavations and precious archaeological finds and the desire to make known the discoveries through letters, hand-coloured sketchbooks, engravings, lithographs, drawings, reliefs, copperplates and gouaches, the first postcards, and daguerreotype photographs.
Pietro Giovanni Guzzo, et al., Ercolano e Pompei: Visioni di una scoperta / Herculaneum and Pompeii: Visions of a Discovery (Milan: Skira, 2018), 392 pages, ISBN: 978-8857238630 (Italian-English text), €38 / $68.
Exhibition | Montepulciano and the Eternal City
Now on view in Montepulciano:
Montepulciano and the Eternal City: Landscapes and Views from the Aesthetics of the Grand Tour to the Mid-Twentieth Century
Museo Civico – Pinacoteca Crociani di Montepulciano, 15 June — 7 October 2018
Curated by Roberto Longi
The exhibition, on view in the Crociani Civic Museum and Picture Gallery of Montepulciano from July 14th to October 7th, compares Rome and the Roman countryside with Montepulciano and its rural outskirts, through more than one hundred oil paintings, drawings, watercolours, and engravings by artists such as Labruzzi, Pacetti, Sartorio, Petrassi, Ranieri Rossi, and Ettore Roesler Franz. Of particular interest are works depicting the views of Rome and the Montepulciano countryside by foreign artists who saw the Grand Tour as a paradigm shift—the Spanish Juan Gimenez Martin, the English Samuel Prout, the Bavarian Karl Lindemann-Frommel, and the Swiss watercolourist Salomon Corrodi, who painted several views for Tsar Nicholas I and Queen Victoria.
In addition to the paintings, the exhibition includes a selection of materials which, carried by a servant, accompanied tourists on their long journeys, providing records of a time and a lifestyle: a travel writing desk, portable inkwells, medicine chests—essential in times of malaria—and tools used to prepare snacks for the journey. The noble traveller had to be perfect on all occasions; hence an iron for ties, a jewelry box, and a fragrance holder, as well as a scale for weighing coins and a travel chessboard to enliven any boring evenings at inns. A walking stick could serve as a good defense weapon or preserve a secret reserve of fine liqueur. The final section of the exhibition presents the working tools of the travelling artists: oil colours and watercolours boxes, palettes and materials for graphic techniques, travel sketchbooks, and folders. The exhibition relies on two important Roman collections and several private collections from Montepulciano.
Roberto Longi, Montepulciano e la Città Eterna: Paesaggi e vedute dall’estetica del Grand Tour alla metà del XX secolo (Rome: C&P Adver Effigi, 2018), 160 pages, ISBN: 978-8864339054, $43.
New Book | Giacomo Raffaelli (1753–1836)
From ArtBooks.com:
Anna Maria Massinelli, ed., with contributions by Massimo Alfieri, Laura Bianchini, and Ekaterina Yakovleva, Giacomo Raffaelli (1753–1836): Maestro di stile e di mosaico (Florence: Aska, 2018), 376 pages, ISBN: 978-8875422943, €110 / $150.
È un’opera monografica dedicata a un mosaicista romano: Giacomo Raffaelli, erede di una tradizione familiare nella produzione di paste vitree risalente alla metà del XVII secolo. Negli ultimi tre decenni del Settecento il suo studio in San Sebastianello, angolo Piazza di Spagna a Roma, divenne una meta obbligata per i sofisticati tourists d’Oltralpe e per la nobiltà europea che non mancava di acquistare placche, tavoli o gioielli ideati dal caposcuola del mosaico minuto romano. La fama raggiunta gli procurò riconoscimenti prestigiosi e nel 1804, su incarico del governo napoleonico, fondò una scuola di mosaico a Milano. Qui si trattenne fino al 1820 portando a compimento uno dei capolavori nel genere del mosaico minuto: la replica a grandezza naturale dell’ ‘Ultima cena’ di Leonardo da Vinci (Vienna, Minoritenkirche). I testi, corredati da ampi apparati documentari e iconografici esaminano l’intera produzione, a oggi nota. La vasta selezione di immagini a colori illustra mosaici e opere lapidee appartenenti a musei e collezioni private in Europa e negli Stati Uniti.
Exhibition | Furniture and Cabinetmakers at the Savoy Court
Luigi Prinotto, Chest with four drawers, depicting stories of Saint Bruno and the foundation of the Carthusian Order, 1736
(Private Collection)
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The exhibition at the Palace Venaria, near Turin, closed in June, but the catalogue is available from ArtBooks.com:
Genius and Skill: Furniture and Cabinetmakers at the Court of Savoy
Venaria Reale, Torino, 17 March — 15 June 2018
The exhibition aims to better define the history of furniture making in Piedmont between the 18th and 19th centuries through a display of 130 exceptional pieces crafted by the finest cabinet-makers and sculptors of the time—Luigi Prinotto, Pietro Piffetti, Giuseppe Maria Bonzanigo, and Gabriele Capello known as ‘Il Moncalvo’—some of which will be presented for the first time thanks to loans from important Piedmontese and international museums and collections.
The purpose of the exhibition is to familiarize the public with precious cabinetmaking and inlay works, emphasizing their significance, use, and transformations with technical and scientific insights and multimedia installations. The exhibition tells the story of an elegant, cultivated, and complex craft that developed in Turin to cater to the needs of important royal and aristocratic patrons, in conjunction with other arts.
Special care has been adopted to design a display that is accessible to disabled visitors, including scale models, touch tablets, olfactory islands, and an Italian Sign Language video-guide. Moreover, description panels and labels are written in the EasyReading font, which is highly readable and facilitates reading for dyslexic persons.
Organizing and Scientific committee: Cesare Annibaldi, Roberto Antonetto, Clelia Arnaldi di Balme, Elisabetta Ballaira, Enrico Colle, Stefania De Blasi, Silvia Ghisotti, Luisa Papotti, Carla Enrica Spantigati
Coordinated by Carlo Callieri
Cesare Annibaldi, Roberto Antonetto, et al, Genio e Maestria: Mobili ed Ebanisti alla Corte Sabauda tra Settecento ed Ottocento (Turin: Allemandi, 2018), 304 pages, ISBN: 978-8842224594, $70.
New Book | Visual Typologies
From Routledge (and now on sale for $120) . . .
Tara Zanardi and Lynda Klich, eds., Visual Typologies from the Early Modern to the Contemporary: Local Contexts and Global Practices (New York: Routledge, 2019), 298 pages, ISBN: 978-1138200135, $150.
Visual Typologies from the Early Modern to the Contemporary investigates the pictorial representation of types from the sixteenth to the twenty-first century. Originating in longstanding visual traditions, including street crier prints and costume albums, these images share certain conventions as they seek to convey knowledge about different peoples. The genre of the type became widespread in the early modern period, developing into a global language of identity. The chapters explore diverse pictorial representations of types, customs, and dress in numerous media, including paintings, prints, postcards, photographs, and garments. Together, they reveal that the activation of typological strategies, including seriality, repetition, appropriation, and subversion has produced a universal and dynamic pictorial language. Typological images highlight the tensions between the local and the international, the specific and the communal, and similarity and difference inherent in the construction of identity. The first full- length study to treat these images as a broader genre, Visual Typologies gives voice to a marginalized form of representation. Together, the chapters debunk the classification of such images as unmediated and authentic representations, offering fresh methodological frameworks to consider their meanings locally and globally, and establishing common ground about the operations of objects that sought to shape, embody, or challenge individual and collective identities.
Tara Zanardi is Associate Professor of Art History, Hunter College, CUNY. Lynda Klich is Assistant Professor of Art History, Hunter College, CUNY.
C O N T E N T S
Contributors
Acknowledgements
Tara Zanardi and Lynda Klich, Introduction to Visual Typologies from the Early Modern to the Contemporary: Local Contexts and Global Practices
Repeating, Borrowing, and Serializing
• Heather A. Hughes, Fashion, Nation, and Morality in English Allegorical Costume Prints, ca. 1620–40
• Sarah E. Buck, Bodies of Work in the Ancien Régime: The Costumes Grotesques by Nicolas I de Larmessin
• Elisabeth Fraser, The Color of the Orient: On Ottoman Costume Albums, European Print Culture, and Cross-Cultural Exchange
• Vanesa Rodríguez-Galindo, On and off the Tram: Contemporary Types and Customs in Madrid’s Illustrated and Satirical Press, 1874–98
Staging Place
• Eugenia Paulicelli, Venice: City of Fashion and Power in Giacomo Franco’s Habiti d’huomini et donne venetiane, ca. 1610
• Yu-chih Lai, Costuming the Empire: A Study on the Production of Tributary Paintings at the Qianlong Court in Eighteenth-Century China
• Denise Birkhofer, Enrique Díaz’s Parade of Progress: Toward a Streamlined Mexican Future
Performing the Documentary
• Emily Kathryn Morgan, ‘True Types of the London Poor’: Street Life in London’s Transitional Typology
• Maya Jiménez, The Myth of the Baiana in Nineteenth-Century Portrait Photography
• Lynda Klich, Circulating lo mexicano in Mauricio Yáñez’s Postcards
• Deborah Dorotinsky, It Is Written in Their Faces: Seri Women and Facial Painting in Photography
Materials of Typologies
• Natalia Majluf, Fashioning a Nation: Military Dress in Peruvian Independence, 1821–22
• Tara Zanardi, From Global Traveler to Costumbrista Motif: The Mantón de Manila and the Appropriation of the Exotic
• Victoria L. Rovine, Cloth, Clothing, and Colonial Power: France and West Africa at the Expositions
• Charlene K. Lau, Against ‘Fashion-Time’: Bernhard Willhelm, Regional Folk Dress, and the Contemporary
Unmasking Stereotypes
• Ashley Bruckbauer, Ambassadors à la turc: Assimilation and Dissimulation in Eighteenth-Century Images of French-Ottoman Diplomacy
• Leyla Belkaïd-Neri, The Transmediterranean Routes of Fashion: Between Material Expression and Artistic Representation
• Teresa Eckmann, Julio Galán and the Type: Fashioning a ‘Border’ Aesthetic
Enfilade 
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