Cultural Heritage Magazine, October 2023
Detail from one of a pair of Spanish-colonial screens depicting a landscape in the Japanese style, possibly made in Mexico City, perhaps 1660s, pigments on paper embellished with embossed and gilded clouds and arches, each screen 249 × 340 cm (Ham House, Surrey, NT 1139576, photograph by Leah Ban).
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Cultural Heritage Magazine is published twice each year, in May and October by the National Trust:
Cultural Heritage Magazine, issue 3 (October 2023)
4 Welcome — John Orna-Ornstein, the National Trust’s Director of Curation and Experience, introduces the autumn issue
6 Briefing: News, events, and publications, plus research and conservation round-ups
Taking the plunge | Archaeological excavations in the basement below Bath Assembly Rooms have revealed the remains of a rare 18th-century cold bath. It is thought to be the only one of its kind located in a historic assembly room, which in the 18th and 19th centuries was a popular place of entertainment, conversation, dancing, and gambling in fashionable towns. In the 18th century, medical practitioners recommended cold bathing as beneficial for various physical and mental ailments, including gout. As a result, plunge pools and cold baths surged in popularity . . . (7).
14 In Conversation — James Rothwell talks to John Benjamin about the National Trust’s under-explored jewellery collections
24 Textile Transmissions — James Clark and Emma Slocombe on repurposing church vestments in the Reformation
Nostell, West Yorkshire, neo-classical lodge, designed by Robert Adam, 1776–77, sandstone ashlar (purchased with HLF funds, 2002). Included in 60 Remarkable Buildings of the National Trust.
34 Set in Stone — George Clarke and Elizabeth Green discuss their shared love of built heritage
Preview of Green’s 60 Remarkable Buildings of the National Trust (National Trust Cultural Heritage Publishing, 2023), which includes an introduction by Clarke.
42 Modern Lives — John Chu and Sean Ketteringham on new research into 20th-century art collections
50 Election Threads — Helen Antrobus on dress, domesticity, and politics
60 Borrowing a Landscape — Emile de Bruijn on a Japanese-style folding screen at Ham House
Preview of de Bruijn’s Borrowed Landscapes: China and Japan in the Historic Houses and Gardens of Britain and Ireland (National Trust and Bloomsbury, 2023).
68 Acquisitions: Selected highlights, 2022–23
Acquisition of an important group of items historically associated with Chirk Castle, Wrexham (acquired by purchase, 2023) . . . The acquisition includes four important early 18th-century landscape paintings depicting the Chirk estate, three by the artist Pieter Tillemans (1684–1734) and one by John Wootton (c.1682–1764); family portraits by artists including Sir Godfrey Kneller and Sir Peter Lely; rare 17th-century furniture in the Servants’ Hall; estate documents including a manuscript of 1563 that shows the first known depiction of Chirk; Neo-classical furniture by Ince and Mayhew; and historic artefacts including items associated with the English Civil War and a rare 17th-century Puritan hat (69).
74 Meet the Expert, Heather Caven, Head of Collections Management and Care
New Book | Borrowed Landscapes
From Bloomsbury:
Emile de Bruijn, Borrowed Landscapes: China and Japan in the Historic Houses and Gardens of Britain and Ireland (London: Philip Wilson Publishers, 2023), 256 pages, ISBN: 978-1781300985, £35 / $45.
The art and ornament of China and Japan have had a deep impact in the British Isles. From the seventeenth century onwards, the design and decoration of interiors and gardens in Britain and Ireland was profoundly influenced by the importation of Chinese and Japanese luxury goods, while domestic designers and artisans created their own fanciful interpretations of ‘oriental’ art. Those hybrid styles and tastes have traditionally been known as chinoiserie and japonisme, but they can also be seen as elements of the wider and still very relevant phenomenon of orientalism, or the way the West sees the East. Illustrated with a wealth of new photography and published in association with the National Trust, Borrowed Landscapes is an engaging survey of orientalism in the Trust’s historic houses and gardens across England, Wales, and Northern Ireland. Drawing on new research, Emile de Bruijn demonstrates how elements of Chinese and Japanese culture were simultaneously desired and misunderstood, dismembered and treasured, idealised, and caricatured.
Emile de Bruijn studied Japanese at the University of Leiden and museology at the University of Essex. After working for the auctioneers Sotheby’s, he joined the National Trust, where he currently works as a decorative arts curator. Among his previous publications is Chinese Wallpaper in Britain and Ireland (Philip Wilson Publishers, 2017).
c o n t e n t s
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1 A Pattern Emerges, 1600–1690
2 Emblems of Aspiration, 1690–1735
3 Peak Chinoiserie, 1735–1760
4 Fictions Have Their Own Logic, 1760–1780
5 Competing Perspectives, 1780–1870
6 The Age of Japonisme, 1870–1900
7 New and Old Orientalisms, the 20th Century
Picture Credits
Notes
Bibliography
Index
New Book | The Revolutionary Temper: Paris, 1748–1789
Coming in November from Norton:
Robert Darnton, The Revolutionary Temper: Paris, 1748–1789 (New York: Norton, 2023), 576 pages, ISBN: 978-1324035589, $45.
When a Parisian crowd stormed the Bastille in July 1789, it triggered an event of global consequence: the overthrow of the monarchy and the birth of a new society. Most historians account for the French Revolution by viewing it in retrospect as the outcome of underlying conditions such as a faltering economy, social tensions, or the influence of Enlightenment thought. But what did Parisians themselves think they were doing—how did they understand their world? What were the motivations and aspirations that guided their actions? In this dazzling history, Robert Darnton addresses these questions by drawing on decades of close study to conjure a past as vivid as today’s news. He explores eighteenth-century Paris as an information society much like our own, its news circuits centered in cafés, on park benches, and under the Palais-Royal’s Tree of Cracow. Through pamphlets, gossip, underground newsletters, and public performances, the events of some forty years—from disastrous treaties, official corruption, and royal debauchery to thrilling hot-air balloon ascents and new understandings of the nation—all entered the churning collective consciousness of ordinary Parisians. As public trust in royal authority eroded and new horizons opened for them, Parisians prepared themselves for revolution. Darnton’s authority and sure judgment enable readers to confidently navigate the passions and complexities of controversies over court politics, Church doctrine, and the economy. And his compact, luminous prose creates an immersive reading experience. Here is a riveting narrative that succeeds in making the past a living presence.
Robert Darnton is Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor and University Librarian, Emeritus, at Harvard University. He is the author of many acclaimed, widely translated works in French history that have won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. A scholar of global stature, he is a Chevalier in the Légion d’honneur and winner of the National Humanities Medal. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
New Book | Saint-Simon in Spain, 1721–1722
From Unicorn Publishing Group:
Vincent Pitts, Saint-Simon in Spain 1721–1722: An Odyssey (Lewes: Unicorn Publishing Group, 2022), 192 pages, ISBN: 978-1914414305, £25 / $38.
The duc de Saint-Simon’s memoirs of the last decades of Louis XIV’s reign and the regency of Philippe d’Orléans are considered a masterpiece of the genre and one of the glories of French literature. His accounts of the dramatic events he witnessed have informed historians for generations, while his literary portraits have influenced French authors from Sainte-Beuve to Proust. In 1721 Saint-Simon travelled to Spain as Ambassador Extraordinary to solicit the hand of a Spanish princess for the young king Louis XV. Although his mission comes very late in his long narrative, that experience looms large in his account of earlier events, hidden in plain sight, and enriched by it. The nineteenth-century essayist Sainte-Beuve dubbed Saint-Simon “the little duke with the penetrating eye.” Readers of this book can decide for themselves how penetrating an eye the little duke could bring to bear on his contemporaries, and on himself.
Vincent J. Pitts holds a PhD in European history from Harvard University. He has taught at several universities and currently teaches at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Connecticut. His earlier books include Embezzlement and High Treason in Louis XIV’s France (2015); Henri IV of France, His Reign and Age (2009); La Grande Mademoiselle at the Court of France (2000); and The Man Who Sacked Rome: Charles de Bourbon, Constable of France (1993).
c o n t e n t s
Foreword
Introduction
Persons Frequently Mentioned in the Text
1 The Making of an Ambassador
2 The Ambassador en Route
3 The Ambassador as Observer
4 The Ambassador at Work
5 The Ambassador at Large
6 The Ambassador Emeritus
A Note on Sources
Bibliography
Notes
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Index
Exhibition | From Pencil to Burin: Drawings for Printmaking
Left: Manuel Salvador Carmona, Drawing of François Boucher (after Alexander Roslin), detail, 1760–61, black and red chalk (Madrid: Museo Nacional del Prado D658). Right: Manuel Salvador Carmona, Print of François Boucher (after Alexander Roslin), detail, 1761, etching and engraving (Madrid: Museo Nacional del Prado G2693). The original source was Roslin’s painted portrait of Boucher, now at Versailles; Salvador Carmona was admitted to the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture as an engraver on the basis of this print; it includes the inscription, “Gravé par Manuel Salvador Carmona pour sa reception à l’Academie en 1761.”
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From the press release (16 October 2023) for the exhibition:
From Pencil to Burin: Drawings for Printmaking in Goya’s Day
Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid, 17 October 2023 — 14 January 2024
Curated by José Manuel Matilla and Ana Hernández Pugh
Until 14 January in Room D of the Jerónimos Building, the Museo del Prado presents the exhibition From Pencil to Burin: Drawings for Printmaking in Goya’s Day. It comprises a selection of 80 prints and drawings revealing the important role of these designs in the creation of intaglio prints in Spain from the mid-18th to the early 19th centuries. The exhibition includes works by a number of artists, while focusing on two key figures for the development of printmaking: Manuel Salvador Carmona (1734–1820), the artist possessed of the greatest technical command of engraving in Spain, and Francisco de Goya (1746–1828), whose remarkable artistic powers and particular understanding of etching opened up new directions in artistic creation.
Curated by José Manuel Matilla, Chief Curator of Prints and Drawings at the Prado, and Ana Hernández Pugh, author of the 2023 catalogue raisonné of Manuel Salvador Carmona’s drawings, the exhibition presents a survey of drawings made as preparatory designs for engravings, emphasizing both their functional and artistic importance. Visitors can see the techniques employed to transpose a composition to a copperplate, thus revealing how preparatory drawings played a significant role in the engraver’s understanding of the work.
The training of qualified draughtsmen and engravers in the second half of the 18th century allowed for the illustration of the texts that disseminated Enlightenment thought. While the prints of this period are well known, the preparatory drawings that acted as their starting point have been relegated to a secondary position in the history of art due to their functional nature. It was, however, the drawings that defined the compositions which were subsequently reproduced on copperplates with absolute precision and fidelity. The exhibition thus reveals a much broader artistic context, articulated around concepts that define the uses and techniques of prints to analyse different phases of the creative process. It shows the diversity of the phases and states through which an intaglio engraver had to pass in order to complete a work. Overall, the exhibition aims to reveal that it was only on the basis of a high quality drawing that a good print could be obtained.
José Manuel Matilla, Ana Hernández Pugh, Gloria Solache Vilela, and Sergio García, Del lapicero al buril: El dibujo para grabar en tiempos de Goya (Madrid: Museo Nacional del Prado, 2023), 264 pages, ISBN: 978-8484806066, €35.
The digital brochure (in English) is available here»
Installation view of the exhibition From Pencil to Burin: Drawings for Printmaking in Goya’s Day (Museo Nacional del Prado, 2023). The freestanding wall presents the first section of the show, “The Drawing and the Printmaker’s Image.”
New Book | Dibujos de Manuel Salvador Carmona (1734–1820)
The publication of this catalogue raisonné of Salvador Carmona’s drawings coincides with the the exhibition, From Pencil to Burin: Drawings for Printmaking in Goya’s Day, now on view at the Prado and co-curated by Pugh. From the CEEH:
Ana Hernández Pugh, Dibujos de Manuel Salvador Carmona (1734–1820): Catálogo razonado (Madrid: Centro de Estudios Europa Hispánica, Biblioteca Nacional de España, and Museo Nacional del Prado, 2023), 672 pages, ISBN: 978-8418760150, €58.
Manuel Salvador Carmona (1734–1820) fue el más destacado grabador de la España ilustrada. Desde su formación en París como primer pensionado de la Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando para el estudio de la talla dulce en la rama de retratos e historia, su compromiso con el arte calcográfico fue ejemplar. En París aprendió con Nicolas-Gabriel Dupuis (1698–1771) y fue el primer español en ser nombrado grabador del rey de Francia. De él se decía que siempre estaba «o con el lapicero o con el buril en la mano», y es que dedicó su larga vida al arte, ya fuera como director de grabado en la Real Academia de San Fernando, como grabador del rey o como maestro de sus discípulos y familiares.
Precisamente es su faceta dibujística—casi desconocida hasta la fecha—la que, con el apoyo de 499 imágenes, se estudia aquí en detalle. Artista meticuloso, conservó gran parte de sus obras, y en este catálogo razonado se reúnen casi trescientos dibujos y contradibujos, tanto preparatorios para el grabado como trazados del natural. Especial valor adquieren los retratos—muchos inéditos hasta ahora—que realizó de sus familiares más cercanos mediante la técnica «de los tres lápices» (negro, rojo y blanco de clarión), cuyo mayor exponente en el París de principios del siglo XVIII era Jean-Antoine Watteau (1684–1721); su obra sirvió a Salvador Carmona para perfeccionarse. Este catálogo razonado contribuye significativamente al estudio del dibujo y el grabado en España al reunir por primera vez de forma sistemática el corpus de dibujos de un grabador y analizar con precisión los aspectos técnicos de los mismos como parte del proceso creativo de las estampas a las que sirvieron como punto de partida, atendiendo a los diferentes procedimientos y papeles empleados, así como a su tipología y su contexto histórico.
Ana Hernández Pugh es graduada en Historia e Historia del Arte por la Universidad CEU San Pablo de Madrid, donde obtuvo el Premio Extraordinario de Fin de Grado. Asimismo, posee el máster en Estudios Avanzados de Museos y Patrimonio Histórico-Artístico de la Universidad Complutense de Madrid y es diplomada en Artes Aplicadas a la Fotografía por el International College of Professional Photography de Melbourne. Gracias a distintas becas, completó su formación en la Biblioteca Nacional de España y en el Museo Nacional del Prado. Colaboró como investigadora en la exposición El maestro de papel. Cartillas para aprender a dibujar de los siglos XVII al XIX (2019) y, junto con José Manuel Matilla, es comisaria de la muestra Del lapicero al buril. El dibujo para grabar en la época de Goya (2023), ambas en el Prado.
Exhibition | Claude Gillot
Claude Gillot, Scène de la comédie italienne: Une pantomime, pen and ink with red chalk wash and graphite drawing, 16 × 22 cm
(Paris: Musée du Louvre, INV 26748)
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300 years after his death, Gillot (1673–1722) was the subject of a spring show at The Morgan and a related symposium; a second exhibition opens next month at the Louvre:
Claude Gillot
Musée du Louvre, Paris, 9 November 2023 – 26 February 2024
Organized by Hélène Meyer and Xavier Salmon
A draughtsman and printmaker in the last years of the Grand Siècle, Claude Gillot is known for the inventiveness and originality of his works, heralding the freedom of expression and mores of the Régence period (1715–1723). With his parodies, witchcraft scenes, farces, and fairground improvisations, he is an artist known for satire, comedy, and performing arts. His countless drawings, coveted by collectors, nevertheless attest to extensive activity in a broad range of fields: illustration, theatre and opera, costume, and interior decoration. At the core of his work, a rich corpus of drawings illustrates his penchant for the comedy of the Comédie Italienne (Italian companies performing in France), with its pantomimes, acrobatics, and cross-dressing figures. A costume and set designer for the Paris Opera starting in 1712, Gillot was also a sought-after decorator, notably collaborating with Claude Audran III on private interiors and reinventing arabesque painting in the process.
Xavier Salmon, Hélène Meyer, and Jennifer Tonkovitch, Claude Gillot (1673–1722): Comédies, Fables, et Arabesques (Paris: Lienart, with the Musée du Louvre, 2023), ISBN: 978-2359064124, €32.
Exhibition | Dutch Art in a Global Age
Now on view at the NC Museum of Art and arriving at the Kimbell in the fall of 2024:
Dutch Art in a Global Age: Masterpieces from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, 16 September 2023 — 7 January 2024
Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, 10 November 2024 — 9 February 2025
Jan van Huysum, Flowers in a Terracotta Vase, 1730, oil on panel, 80 × 61 cm (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Promised gift of Rose-Marie and Eijk van Otterloo, in support of the Center for Netherlandish Art, L-R 13.2019).
In the seventeenth century, Dutch merchants sailed across seas and oceans, joining trade networks that stretched from Asia to the Americas and Africa. This unprecedented movement of goods, ideas, and people gave rise to what many consider the first age of globalization and sparked an artistic boom in the Netherlands.
Dutch Art in a Global Age brings together paintings by Rembrandt, Frans Hals, Gerrit Dou, Jacob van Ruisdael, Maria Schalcken, Rachel Ruysch, and other celebrated artists from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston’s renowned collection. These are joined by prints, maps, and stunning decorative objects in silver, porcelain, glass, and more, from the seventeenth and the first half of the eighteenth centuries. Exploring how Dutch dominance in international commerce transformed life in the Netherlands and created an extraordinary cultural flourishing, the exhibition also includes new scholarship that contextualizes seventeenth-century Dutch art within the complex histories of colonial expansion, wealth disparity, and the transatlantic slave trade during this period.
Christopher D.M. Atkins, ed., Dutch Art in a Global Age (Boston: MFA Publications, 2023), 224 pages, ISBN: 978-0878468911, £54 / $60. With text by Christopher Atkins, Pepijn Brandon, Simona Di Nepi, Stephanie Dickey, Michele Frederick, Hanneke Grootenboer, Katherine Harper, Courtney Leigh Harris, Mary Hicks, Anna Knaap, Rhona MacBeth, Katrina Newbury, Christine Storti, Gerri Strickler, Claudia Swan, Jeroen van der Vliet, and Benjamin Weiss.
New Book | Exhibiting Antonio Canova
From Amsterdam UP:
Christina Ferando, Exhibiting Antonio Canova: Display and the Transformation of Sculptural Theory (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2023), 296 pages, ISBN: 978-9463724098, €157 / $177.
Exhibiting Antonio Canova: Display and the Transformation of Sculptural Theory argues that the display of Canova’s sculptures in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries acted as a catalyst for discourse across a broad range of subjects. By enshrining his marble figures alongside plaster casts of ancient works, bathing them in candlelight, staining and waxing their surfaces, and even setting them in motion on rotating bases, Canova engaged viewers intellectually, physically, and emotionally. These displays inspired discussions on topics as diverse as originality and artistic production, the association between the sculptural surface, flesh, and anatomy, the relationship between painting and sculpture, and the role of public museums. Beholders’ discussions also shaped the legacy of important sculptural theories. They helped usher in their modern definitions and created the lenses through which we experience and interpret works of art, establishing modern attitudes not just towards sculpture, but towards cultural patrimony in general.
Christina Ferando is the Dean of Jonathan Edwards College and Lecturer in the Department of History of Art at Yale University.
c o n t e n t s
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Canova on Display
1 Imagining Sculptural Practice
2 Reevaluating Ancients and Moderns
3 Anatomizing the Female Nude
4 Challenging the Supremacy of Painting
5 Defining Modern Sculpture
Conclusion: Aftereffects
Bibliography
Index
Exhibition | Hub of the World: Art in 18th-Century Rome
Gaspar van Wittel, known as Vanvitelli, The ‘Casino’ of Cardinal Annibale Albani on the Via Aurelia, 1719, oil on canvas, 74 × 135 cm
(Private Collection, United Kingdom)
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From the press release (via Art Daily) for the exhibition:
Hub of the World: Art in 18th-Century Rome
Nicholas Hall Gallery, New York, 6 October — 30 November 2023
This fall, Nicholas Hall presents Hub of the World: Art in 18th-Century Rome, organized in association with the Milanese Galleria Carlo Orsi. Presented at the Upper East Side gallery in New York, the exhibition celebrates the legacy of esteemed American scholar, connoisseur, and artist Anthony M. Clark (1923–1976), who would have turned 100 this year.
Pompeo Batoni, Saint Louis Gonzaga, ca. 1744, oil on canvas, oval, in an 18th-century frame, 81 × 67 cm (Private Collection, NY).
Considered one of the most influential and admired museum professionals of his generation, Clark made a profound impact on American collecting trends in the 1950s and 1960s through his taste for art made in 18th-century Rome, especially the paintings of the Pompeo Batoni. The exhibition brings together more than 60 works by artists who lived in or traveled to Rome in the 18th century, along with a selection of Clark’s personal notebooks and a portrait photograph on loan from the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC.
After graduating from Harvard, Clark began his career in 1955 at the Rhode Island School of Design before going on to prominent curatorial roles at the National Gallery of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, of which he later became director. He also taught art history at the Institute of Fine Arts, NYU and at Williams College, Williamstown. During his tenure at Mia and The Met, Clark made significant acquisitions for the institutions and organized world-class exhibitions as a pioneering American scholar of 18th-century Rome.
The Hub of the World brings to light the fundamental role Clark played in the revival of interest among American museums in collecting work from this period. Clark deeply believed in the importance of Roman Settecento painting, drawing, and sculpture, and this passion is brilliantly reflected in his scholarship and writings. As a curator, he consistently created a historic context for art by showing sculpture and decorative arts alongside paintings and drawings at a time when it was customary to maintain a ‘hierarchy’ of the arts by studying and displaying the mediums separately.
Domenico Corvi, The Liberation of Saint Peter, 1770, oil on canvas, 63 × 49 cm (Private Collection, Paris).
Tragically Clark succumbed to a heart attack at age 53 while jogging in his favorite city, where, at the time, he was a fellow at the American Academy in Rome. Born in Philadelphia, Clark worked closely with curators at the Philadelphia Museum of Art over the course of his career; and, in 2000, the PMA—in partnership with the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston—mounted The Splendor of 18th-Century Rome, which was dedicated to his memory.
In the words of Nicholas Hall: “Anthony Clark was a larger-than-life character who changed the way we look at Old Masters. He rescued the art of 18th-century Rome from obscurity by dint of his own personal enthusiasm and brilliant scholarship. He had enormous personal charm: the son of the owner of two works in the exhibition remembers how, as a boy, he enjoyed Clark’s visits to see his parents. Clark, an avid ornithologist, later bequeathed to him a stuffed Green Woodpecker. Our exhibition is an homage to a great scholar, a tastemaker, and a dedicated museum professional.”
Hub of the World highlights the richness of the culture of 18th-century Rome with its extraordinary mixture of patronage, from popes and cardinals, to Roman aristocrats and visiting foreigners—including the German writer and poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, from whom the exhibition borrows its title. Goethe deemed Rome the “hub of the world,” writing that “the entire history of the world is linked up with this city.” Hall and Orsi have gathered a diverse selection of paintings, drawings, sculpture, and decorative arts that will provide a rare opportunity to experience the cosmopolitan appeal of 18th-century Rome.
Hubert Robert, Colonnade and Gardens at the Villa Medici, 1759, oil on canvas, 75 × 64 cm (Assadour O. Tavitian Trust).
Headlining the exhibition is View of the Villa Medici by Hubert Robert (1733–1808), painted in 1759 during the artist’s transformative time in Rome and on loan from the Assadour O. Tavitian Trust. A recent discovery, the exceptional work has rarely been on view to the public—previously only exhibited in the U.S. briefly at the National Gallery of Art. Other works on view include the Hemp Harvest in Caserta, executed by Jackob Philipp Hackert for the King of Naples; a portrait of the Cardinal Carlo Rezzonico by Anton Raphael Mengs that remained in the sitter’s family until the last decade; a unique view of the Villa Albani by Vanvitelli, recorded in the inventory of Cardinal Albani; a pair of oil on coppers by Angelika Kauffmann based on James Thomson’s pastoral poetry that newly resurfaced from a private Kenyan collection; a caricature painting by Joshua Reynolds, recently discovered at the estate where it has hung for over two centuries; A Vestal by Jacques-Louis David painted in Rome; a harbor scene painted on copper by Claude Joseph Vernet; Anton von Maron’s Portrait of Two English Gentlemen before the Arch of Constantine; the Rockingham Silenus, a 1st-century sculpture reworked by the celebrated Roman sculptor Bartolomeo Cavaceppi; a set of candelabras in the form of Antonius-Osirus by Luigi Valadier; and a console table designed by Antonio Asprucci, made for the Egyptian Room of the Palazzo Borghese. The exhibition pays tribute to Clark as an expert on Pompeo Batoni, as represented by a painting of Saint Louis Gonzaga and its preparatory drawing in red chalk, among several other works. Once belonging to Clark, a painting of the artist Paolo de Matteis by Pier Leone Ghezzi will also be showcased.
In conjunction with the exhibition, Nicholas Hall and Galleria Carlo Orsi will publish a fully illustrated catalogue with original essays by Italian art experts and renowned historians Edgar Peters Bowron, Alvar Gonzáles-Palacios, Melissa Beck Lemke, and J. Patrice Marandel.
Pier Leone Ghezzi, Four Samples of Classical Polychrome Marbles, 1726, watercolor on paper; from top left clockwise: ‘Diaspro Verde Fiorito, 16 × 21 cm, ‘Bianco e negro antico’, 19 × 24 cm, ‘Broccatello’, 19 × 21 cm, ‘Alabastro Orientale’, 19 × 23 cm (Private Collection, Italy). To be published by Dr. Adriano Aymonino in his upcoming book from MIT press, Paper Marbles: Pier Leone Ghezzi’s Studio di Molte Pietre (1726).
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