Exhibition: ‘Claude Lorrain: The Enchanted Landscape’
From the Ashmolean:
Claude Lorrain: The Enchanted Landscape
Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology, Oxford, 6 October 2011 — 8 January 2012
Städel Museum, Frankfurt, 3 February — 6 May 2012
Curated by Jon Whiteley
Claude Lorrain, "Landscape with Ascanius Shooting the Stag of Sylvia," 1682 (Oxford: Ashmolean Museum)
The Ashmolean’s major exhibition this autumn will be Claude Lorrain: The Enchanted Landscape, rediscovering the father of European landscape painting, Claude Gellée (ca. 1600–1682), or Claude Lorrain as he is best known.
In partnership with the Städel Museum, Frankfurt, the exhibition will bring together 140 works from international collections, created at different points in the artist’s career. By uniting ‘pairs’ of Claude’s paintings and making a comprehensive survey of his work in different media, the exhibition brings new research to bear on his working methods, to reveal an unconventional side to Claude which has previously been little known.
Born in France, Claude travelled first to Italy at the age of 13 or 14, settling in Rome for the rest of his life in 1627. The scenery of his great compositions was based on his studies of the ancient ruins and the rolling country of the Tiber Valley and the Roman Campagna. Claude’s ability to translate his vision of the countryside and the majesty of natural light with the aid of his brush won him the admiration of his contemporaries, above all else, as a ‘natural painter’. It has been his signature treatment of classical landscape and literature which has impressed itself on generations of artists and collectors, and which has made his name synonymous with great landscape painting.
ISBN: 9781848220928, $80
The cult of Claude which grew up in the 18th and 19th centuries, begun by British ‘Grand Tourists’, has left a profound mark on our history and landscape. English country houses are well stocked with both originals by Claude and with copies. Responding to aristocratic taste and fashion, designers such as Capability Brown, Henry Hoare and William Kent reproduced his ideal views in the parklands of great houses from Blenheim Palace, Rousham House and Stowe, to Stourhead and Chatsworth. Claude’s drawings were collected with no less enthusiasm by English connoisseurs, as a result, over 40% of his drawings are now in the British Museum. Claude’s influence on later artists is apparent in the work of Gainsborough, Turner and Constable, who described him as ‘the most perfect landscape painter the world ever saw’.
A lesser-known side to Claude is the eccentricity of his graphic art. Claude Lorrain: The Enchanted Landscape will exhibit 13 paintings alongside related drawings and etchings from international and private collections, and from the Ashmolean’s own extensive holdings. Claude was a dedicated graphic artist. He drew for the sake of mastering the world of nature but also because drawing was a pleasure in itself. Many of his drawings were made as works of art in their own right. During his own lifetime Claude’s fame grew rapidly. As a guard against forgeries, he made copies of his paintings in a book, the Liber Veritatis (Book of Truth), which, by the time of his death, contained 200 drawings. The book also gave him a collection of ideas which he could reuse when necessary. Although he made only 40 prints in total, all of which are on display, he took a serious interest in printmaking. Similar to his drawings, his principle focus was to explore the potential of the medium. His exceptional technique – a painterly brush-and-ink style replicating natural effects – was a novelty in contemporary printmaking. The spectacular ‘Fireworks’ series, ten etchings made during a week of firework displays in Rome, illustrate his experimental style and will be on show together in the Ashmolean’s exhibition.
Unlike contemporaries who had an academic training, Claude’s style and artistic process were unique to him. He worked frequently with existing materials progressing from one painting to another through a process of variation and combination. His sketching excursions provided him with a stock of motifs, including trees, hills, rivers and antique ruins, which became constant accessories in his paintings. Figure groups were shifted from one composition to another. Landscapes, like stage scenery, were taken out for reuse with a different set of characters. Elsewhere he would cut compositions in two or enlarge them with separate sheets. Occasionally, he would pick up a discarded study and add detail to make it a finished work of art, often with peculiar results.
Claude was also the first artist to specialise in painting ‘pairs’. Approximately half his compositions were made as companion pieces, the earliest of which, on display here, are Landscape with the Judgement of Paris and Coast View (both 1633). The idea of pairs is also found among his prints. While many of his pairs show a compositional correspondence, contrast played as great a role as similarity. Often an Arcadian landscape is combined with a maritime view, or a morning scene with an evening setting. The pairs were not always executed concurrently: his very last painting, the Ashmolean’s great Ascanius and the Stag of Sylvia (1682), was made 5 years after its companion, Aeneas’s Farewell to Dido in Carthage (1676) now in Hamburg.
Claude Lorrain: The Enchanted Landscape will display some of Claude’s greatest masterpieces, works which have made his art familiar and well-loved. In placing these beside his graphic art and exploring his singular methods of working, the exhibition aims to expose an unexplored dimension to one of the western canon’s most famous names.
“Claude’s art is recognisable to almost all of us, even if we are less familiar with his name, and this important exhibition will reintroduce us to one of the greatest painters of all time.” Dr Jon Whiteley, Exhibition Curator and Senior Assistant Keeper of Western Art, Ashmolean Museum.
Catalogue: Martin Sonnabend, Jon Whiteley, and Christian Rumelin, Claude Lorrain: The Enchanted Landscape (London: Lund Humphries, 2011), 200 pages, ISBN: 9781848220928, $80.
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S E L E C T E D P R O G R A M M I N G
Colin Harrison (Senior Assistant Keeper of Western Art, Ashmolean Museum), Claude, Wilson, Turner
Saturday, 12 November, 11:00
Claude’s landscape paintings had a profound influence on British artists in the 18th and 19th century. This lecture focuses on his long-lasting inspiration, most apparent in the work of Richard Wilson (1714–1782) and J.M.W Turner (1775-1851).
Michael Clarke (Director of the Scottish National Gallery), Arcadia Revisited – Claude’s Enduring Legacy
Wednesday, 16 November, 2:00
Generally acknowledged as the founder of the European landscape tradition, Claude Lorrain was admired by many of the great European painters, especially Constable and Turner. His work exerted an enormous influence on later generations even eliciting praise from the Impressionist Camille Pissarro. This lecture charts the perennial attraction of an artist who ‘conducts us to the tranquility of Arcadian scenes and fairy land’ (Sir Joshua Reynolds).
Christopher Woodward (Director of the Garden Museum), Claude Lorrain and the Making of the English Landscape Garden
Wednesday, 7 December, 5:00
How did a French artist working in Rome in the 17th-century inspire the creation of 18th-century gardens such as Blenheim, Rousham and Stourhead? Christopher Woodward, Director of The Garden Museum and author of “In Ruins”, explores how Claude’s idyllic Italian scenes inspired the transformation of English gardens into visions of Arcadia.
Hannah Williams, Art History in the Pub
The Association of Art Historians (the British equivalent of CAA), has launched a series of free events intended for a general audience and held in a pub. The next talk, at The Monarch, is to be given by Hannah Williams on September 26th. -CH.
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Hannah Williams, The Violent Suicide of François Lemoyne: An 18th-Century Art History Mystery
The Monarch Pub, London, 26 September 2011
18th-Century French Sword (Photo Source: V&A Collections)
As part of the AAH’s commitment to bringing the best in cutting-edge art-historical research to a wider community, we are pleased to be able to announce a hopefully-regular Art History in the Pub series of talks, lectures and events. Our talks present a selection of the wide variety of topics, periods, methods and approaches common in art historical study, and are aimed at a generalist audience.
Paris, 4 June 1737: the celebrated artist François Lemoyne commits suicide. It started as an ordinary day. Lemoyne had been to his studio to give a lesson to his students and taken a meal with his cousin. But then events took a macabre turn. Lemoyne retired to his bedroom, carefully locked the door, took up his sword, and proceeded to inflict upon his body multiple fatal stab wounds, before dropping to the floor and dying in a pool of blood.
Lemoyne’s death shocked and horrified his family and colleagues, and it has since presented something of a mystery for art historians. Why should this incredibly successful artist – first painter to Louis XV – have wanted to kill himself only months after completing what is now considered his magnum opus: the ceiling of the Apotheosis of Hercules at the Château de Versailles? Was it over money? Professional jealousy? A madness induced by lack of recognition? Could it have been murder? Or if it really was suicide, then how did Lemoyne complete his gruesome task?
With most of the clues now lost deep in the past, some art-historical sleuthing is necessary in order to retrieve the traces. In this paper, I attempt to solve these perplexing mysteries through a forensic and art-historical analysis of the object responsible: Lemoyne’s sword. Using police reports, autopsies, and witness statements, I piece together the final hours of Lemoyne’s life and offer a material reconstruction of the now lost fatal weapon, exploring what Lemoyne’s sword looked like, what he did with it, and what it meant to him. Drawn from a larger study investigating what artists’ personal possessions reveal about their everyday lives, this case explores the limits and possibilities of object-biography, and presents an exercise in recovering the material history of an object when that object no longer materially exists.
Can art history solve the crime? Come along and find out!
Hannah Williams is a Junior Research Fellow in Art History at St John’s College, Oxford. A specialist in 17th- and 18th-century French art, Hannah completed her PhD at the Courtauld Institute of Art in 2010 and previously held a doctoral fellowship at the Centre Allemand d’Histoire de l’Art in Paris. She is currently writing a book on artists’ portraits and self-portraits entitled Face-to-Face with the Académie Royale: An Ethnography in Portraiture, which combines art-historical and anthropological approaches to investigate the culture of an early modern community of artists. Hannah is also researching a post-doctoral project – Painters and Parish Life – which traces the local social networks of artists in 18th-century Paris through a study of parish churches and religious art. With Katie Scott, she is writing a book on Artists’ Things, which offers an alternative guide to the material culture of 18th-century French artists through close studies of their personal possessions.
More information about the Art History in the Pub series is available here»
This Year’s Seminar Series at the BGC
The Bard Graduate Center’s 2011-2012 Seminar Series looks especially promising. The following is a selection of eighteenth-century topics, while the full program is available here
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Bard Graduate Center Seminar Series
New York, 2011-2012
Bard Graduate Center, West 86 Street, New York, NY. Photo: Wikimedia Commons
October 11
Florian Knothe (Curator of European Glass, Corning Museum of Glass)
Beyond the Old Silk Road: International Influences in Glassmaking in the 18th and 19th Centuries
October 25
Sylvain Cordier (Independent Scholar)
Bellangé, Ebénistes à Paris: A History of Taste in Early Nineteenth-Century France
February 22
Robert Stein (Museum Information Systems, Indianapolis Museum of Art)
Conversation and Collaboration: Strategies to Cultivate Meaningful Engagement with Cultural Audiences
February 28
Kristel Smentek (Architecture, MIT)
Encountering Asia in Eighteenth-Century France
March 13
Sussan Babaie (Art History, Ludwig-Maximilians University, Munich)
Nadir Shah’s Delhi Loot and the Eighteenth-Century Exotics of Empire
April 3
Kimberly Chrisman-Campbell (Independent Curator)
When Fashion Set Sail: Maritime Modes in Pre-Revolutionary France
Shoemaking Workshop in New York
Even if you’re not up for the whole week-long workshop, Monday’s public seminar on eighteenth-century shoes sounds like lots of fun. I stumbled upon the event through the 18th-Century Blog: Fashion and Culture from the 1700s, which in turn links to A Fashionable Frolick. As for getting straight to the source, we have Nicole at The Mantua Maker to thank. The following description comes from her website:
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Workshop on Making Eighteenth-Century Shoes
New York, 20-27 August 2011
Led by Brett Walker, an apprentice shoemaker at Colonial Williamsburg
. . . There will be an eight-hour stitching workshop on the Saturday prior to the full class (20 August) that will be open to the publick. This part is a prerequisite, of course, to the full shoemaking workshop, and the fee is included in the total class fees for students of the entire class. However, this day will also be open to the general public as well for a stand-alone $60-per-person fee. We will cover measuring and making up of threads, attaching bristles, shoemaker’s stitch, round-closing, split-and-lift stitches, “subcutaneous” whip-stitches, stabbing stitches, & perhaps some miscellaney like how to make black wax, &c.
Sunday the 21st will be a short recess, and then the shoemaking class will begin in earnest at 8:00 a.m. on Monday morning, 22 August. The first hour-and-an-half or two hours will be a brief seminar on men’s and women’s shoe fashions, ca. 1700-1800, in which we’ll be attempting to “raise the bar” of the attendee’s awareness of stylistic and construction details in the various decades of the 18th-Century. This will most likely be open to the public for a $35 stand-alone fee, but that has not been confirmed.
At ten o’clock, we will take a brief break, after which those folks who are taking the full six-day class will dive right in to making instruction, wrapping up by five o’clock on Saturday, 27 August. When the workshop is completed, the students should have at least one shoe finished and perhaps a second one started.
Interdisciplinary Approaches to Material Culture at Cambridge
Domenico Remps, "Trompe-l'oeil with an Open Cabinet" (detail), ca. 1700 (Florence: Museo dell'Opificio delle Pietre Dure)
From CRASSH at the University of Cambridge:
Things: Material Cultures of the Long Eighteen Century
Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH), Cambridge, ongoing series
The eighteenth century was the century of ‘stuff.’ Public production, collection, display and consumption of objects grew in influence, popularity, and scale. The form, function, and use of objects, ranging from scientific and musical instruments to weaponry and furnishings were influenced by distinct features of the time. Eighteenth-century knowledge was not divided into strict disciplines, in fact practice across what we now see as academic boundaries was essential to material creation. This seminar series will use an approach based on objects to encourage us to consider the unity of ideas of the long-eighteenth century, to emphasise the lived human experience of technology and art, and the global dimension of material culture. We will re-discover the interdisciplinary thinking through which eighteenth-century material culture was conceived, gaining new perspectives on the period through its artefacts. Subscribe to the group mailing list at https://lists.cam.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/crassh-things
Conveners
Katy Barrett Co-Secretary (Department of History and Philosophy of Science)
Sophie Waring Co-Secretary (Department of History and Philosophy of Science)
Adrian Leonard Treasurer (Affiliate Research Student, Winton Centre for Financial History)
Susannah Brooke (Faculty of History)
Molly Dorkin (Department of History of Art)
Simon Layton (Faculty of History)
Eoin Phillips (Department of History and Philosophy of Science)
Jonathan Yarker (Department of History of Art)
Faculty Advisors
Dr Melisssa Calaresu (Faculty of History)
Dr Patricia Fara (Director of Studies, Dept of History and Philosophy of Science)
Dr Mark Goldie (Chairman and Reader in British Intellectual History, Fac of History)
Dr William O’Reilly (Associate Director, Centre for History and Economics)
Professor Simon Schaffer (Professor of History of Science, HPS)
Professor Liba Taub (Director and Curator of the Whipple Museum, HPS)
Professor Nick Thomas (Prof of Historical Anthropology, Director of the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology)
Dr Richard Dunn (Curator of the History of Navigation, National Maritime Museum)
Dr Catherine Eagleton (Curator of Modern Money, British Museum)
Dr Kim Sloan (Francis Finlay Curator of the Enlightenment Galleries and Curator of British Watercolours and Drawings before 1880, British Museum)
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The fall schedule:
Things: Material Cultures of the Long 18th Century
Programme for Michaelmas Term 2011
Each seminar will feature two talks each considering the same type of object from different perspectives.
A R T E F A C T S
Tuesday, 11 Oct 2011
Professor Simon Schaffer (HPS, Cambridge) and Professor Nick Thomas (Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, Cambridge)
B O T A N Y
Tuesday, 25 Oct 2011
Dr Kim Sloan (British Museum) and Dr Charlie Jarvis (Natural History Museum)
S C I E N T I F I C I N S T R U M E N T S
Tuesday, 8 Nov 2011
Dr Richard Dunn (National Maritime Museum) and Dr Alexi Baker (HPS, Cambridge)
C O I N S
Tuesday, 22 Nov 2011
Dr Catherine Eagleton (British Museum) and Dr Martin Allen (Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge)
Evening of Linen at Fenton House
As noted at Treasure Hunt (with lovely photos), Selvedge Magazine, in association with the National Trust, is hosting an evening on linen. From the website invitation:
We Love Linen
Fenton House, Hampstead (London), 28 June 2011
Linen cupboard at Hardwick Hall, Derbyshire ©NTPL, Nadia Mackenzie / Exterior of Fenton House ©NTPL, Matthew Antrobus
Join Selvedge at Fenton House in Hampstead on Tuesday 28 June. The charming 17th-century merchant’s house which has remained virtually unaltered over the last 300 years of continuous occupation, will provide a period backdrop to our evening dedicated to the beauty of linen. And if the weather is fine there will be a short time to explore the beautifully kept gardens, enjoy a glass of wine and strawberries and cream before the talks begin.
Our first speaker is Amanda Vickery, author of Behind Closed Doors: At Home in Georgian England and our “The Lure of White Linen” article, issue 39, page 22. Amanda will speak about the role of household linens in Georgian England. She will be followed by Elizabeth Baer, who will be sharing her lifelong passion for linen, and the forming of her collection. There will be time after the talks to view some of Elizabeth’s
antique linens and a selection will be available to purchase.
Ticket includes entrance to the house, glass of wine, and
strawberries and cream. Tickets, £35, concessions* £30.
Tickets are available here»
This Week’s Romantic Objects Seminar in London: Blake and Varley
Philippa Simpson and Sibylle Erle, Varley’s Visionary Heads and Blake’s The Ghost of a Flea
Institute of English Studies, University of London, 15 June 2011
William Blake, "The Ghost of a Flea," ca. 1819-20, tempera heightened with gold on mahogany support (London: Tate Britain)
Romantic Objects is a seminar series that runs over two terms (Spring and Summer) on Wednesdays 5:30-7:30, as part of the inter-university seminar in Romantic Studies at Senate House, co-organized by Birkbeck and the Open University at the Institute of English Studies. This series of seminars will rethink Romantic period material culture in the tension between Romantic attempts to recenter aesthetic experience as subjective just as a new culture of exhibitions, viewing, and collecting practices defines the centrality of objects. The aim is to provide a forum for graduate students, scholars, and curators working in the period 1750-1850 or on questions relating to objects, exhibitions, material culture.
This week’s seminar features Dr Philippa Simpson (Tate Britain) and Dr Sibylle Erle (Bishop Grosseteste College, Lincoln) on John Varley’s Visionary Heads and William Blake’s The Ghost of a Flea. Erle and Simpson curated the current display of Blake and Physiognomy at Tate Britain. Erle is the author of Blake, Lavater and Physiognomy (2010). Simpson, an expert in late eighteenth-century exhibition culture and the
reception of the old masters, co-curated the exhibition Turner and the
Masters. The seminar takes place Wednesday, 15 June, 17:30-19:30, in
STB8 Stewart House, basement, 32 Russell Square. All are welcome!
Reading:
Alexander Gilchrist, Life of Blake (1863), pp. 249-57, (via Googlebooks)
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Sibylle Erle, Blake, Lavater, and Physiognomy (Oxford: Legenda, 2010), 244 pages, ISBN: 9781906540692, $89.
ISBN: 9781906540692
William Blake never travelled to the continent, and yet his creation myth is far more European than has so far been acknowledged. His early illuminated books, of the 1790s, run alongside his professional work as a copy-engraver on Henry Hunter’s translation of Johann Caspar Lavater’s Essays on Physiognomy (1789-98) — work in which Blake helped to make a likeness of a book about likenesses. For Blake, as for Lavater, Henry Fuseli, Joshua Reynolds, and others of his age, the art of the portrait was to find the right balance between likeness and type. Blake, Lavater, and Physiognomy demonstrates how the problems occurring during the production of the Hunter translation resonate in Blake’s treatment of the Genesis story. Blake takes us back to the creation of the human body, and interrogates the idea that ‘God created man after his own likeness’. He introduces the ‘Net of Religion’, a device which presses the human form into material shape, giving it personality and identity. As Erle shows, Blake’s startlingly original take on the creation myth is informed by Lavater’s pursuit of physiognomy: the search for divine likeness, traced in the faces of their contemporary men.
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Blake and Physiognomy
Tate Britain, London, 8 November 2010 — 17 April 2011
Curated by Philippa Simpson and Sibylle Erle
[There is] not a man who does not judge of all things…by their physiognomy;
that is, of their internal worth by their external appearance.
–Johann Caspar Lavater
Johann Caspar Lavater’s Essays on Physiognomy, translated into English in 1789, catalysed a vogue for the theory that people’s characters could be read in their features. Although this would seem to serve as a model of detached observation and scientific classification, Lavater saw these judgements as stemming from an instinctive understanding of expression and appearance. At the heart of his work was a strongly-held Christian belief, according to which all forms were divinely created, and derived from the one perfect God. Lavater’s ideas were also informed by eighteenth-century codes of racial stereotyping that are deeply troubling to the modern reader.
Many British artists, including William Blake, experimented with physiognomic systems in their work. Blake’s involvement, though, was closer than most. He not only engraved illustrations for the 1789 translation of Lavater’s book but, over thirty years later collaborated with his friend, artist and astrologer John Varley, on a publication entitled Zodiacal Physiognomy. This book sought to attribute character according to time of birth, and Varley used prints after Blake’s works to illustrate different star signs. These enterprises suggest that Blake’s visual language, which often seems highly innovative – even idiosyncratic – may be read in the context of broader pseudo-scientific and artistic trends.
Eighteenth-Century Maps: A Fair, a Lecture, and a New Reference Book
Press release from The London Map Fair:
2011 London Antique Map Fair
Royal Geographic Society, London, 11-12 June 2011
Johann Baptist Homann. "Sphærarum Artificialium Typica..." Nuremberg, ca.1730.
The 2011 London Map Fair, taking place in the historic surroundings of the Royal Geographical Society, is the most established and largest antiquarian map fair in Europe: over forty of the leading national and international specialist map dealers will be exhibiting in June. Visitors to the fair will discover a vast selection of original antique maps covering the whole world and printed between the 15th and 19th centuries. Highlights include a map of the universe by seventeenth-century Venetian cartographer Coronelli, revealing the Nine Circles of Hell as described in Dante’s Divine Comedy, as well as a 19th-century curiosity map of Europe depicting each country in the form of a caricature: the United Kingdom
figures as an old crone.
Johann Gabriel Doppelmayr, "Globi Coelestis," 1 of 6 Celestial Charts, Nuremberg, Homann, 1742
Other fine maps offered this year will include: an example of Ogilby’s innovative and incredibly detailed, 17th-century road map, marking all inns, churches and other landmarks on the road from London to Portsmouth – the course of the modern A3; an impression of Braun and Hogenberg’s bird’s-eye view of London; the earliest surviving printed plan of the city, dated 1574; and Christoph Vetter’s rare and beautiful 17th-century depiction of Bohemia stylised as a rose, with Prague at its centre and Vienna, the seat of the Hapsburg Dynasty, at its root. Exhibitors will offer atlases, travel books, globes, sea charts, town plans, celestial maps, topographical prints and
reference books; there are prices to suit all pockets ranging
from a very affordable £10 to over £100,000 for exceptional
pieces.
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2011 London Map Fair Lecture: Laurence Worms and Ashley Baynton-Williams
Royal Geographic Society, London, 11 June 2011
On Saturday, 11 June 2011, at 2:30pm, Laurence Worms and Ashley Baynton-Williams will launch their long-awaited Dictionary of British Map Engravers at the Fair. The product of over twenty years of research, it offers a wealth of fresh material on the map trade and a new insight into the lives of its most important figures, revealing some surprising links and relationships in the process.
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From the International League of Antiquarian Booksellers:
Laurence Worms and Ashley Baynton-Williams, British Map Engravers: A Dictionary of Engravers, Lithographers and Their Principal Employers to 1850 (London: Rare Book Society, 2011), approximately 750 pages, £125.
The ultimate guide to the identification of British antique maps and their makers: An illustrated dictionary of over 1,500 members of the map trade in England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales, of British-born engravers working overseas and foreign engravers working in the British Isles, from the beginnings until the mid 19th century. Included are all the known engravers and lithographers, globemakers and retailers, the principal map sellers and publishers, key cartographers, makers of map-based games and puzzles, but also the remarkable lives of many artists, dealers and publishers, whose fates have been unknown so far. (more…)
Turkish Taste at the Frick Opens June 8
In conjunction with the exhibition at the Frick Collection, Turkish Taste at the Court of Marie-Antoinette (opening June 8), the museum is hosting a seminar on Monday, 27 June, 6:00-7:30 p.m. From the Frick’s website:
Carlotte Vignon and Adrienne L. Childs, Turkish Taste at the Court of Marie-Antoinette
The Frick Collection, New York, 27 June 2011
Small Console Table with Supporting Figures of Nubians (one of a pair), c.1780, gilded and painted wood and marble slab (NY: The Frick Collection), photo by Michael Bodycomb
This seminar will offer participants a detailed look at several objects from the special exhibition. Charlotte Vignon will discuss the Frick’s two French console tables, which feature Nubian slaves with pearl-accented turbans, floral garlands, and a frieze of crossed crescents, a symbol of the Ottoman Empire. She will also examine a pair of firedogs from Marie-Antoinette’s Turkish boudoir at Fontainebleau, on loan from the Musée du Louvre, and a pair of wall panels created for the Turkish cabinet of her brother-in-law, the comte d’Artois, from The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Click here to register at the regular rate of $100 per person. Members of The Frick Collection may click here to register at the discounted membership rate of $90 per person. Discounts will be applied upon verification of membership. To register over the phone, please call 212.547.0704.
Collecting and the Art Market in Venice and Rome
This round table has been organized by Nathalie Volle et Chantal Georgel. From the INHA:
Collectionnisme et marché de l’art à Venise et à Rome au XVIIIème siècle
Institut national d’histoire de l’art, Paris, 17 May 2011
Table ronde autour des livres de Paolo Coen (Il mercato dei quadri a Roma nel Diciottesimo secolo, la domanda, la offerta e la circolazione delle opere in un grande centro artistico europeo), et de Stefania Mason (Il collezionismo d’arte a Venezia. Il Settecento). Participants: Paolo Coen, Stefania Mason, Daniela Gallo, Nathalie Volle.
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Linda Borean, Stefania Mason, eds. Il collezionismo d’arte a Venezia. Il Settecento (Venice: Marsilio, 2009), 432 pages, ISBN: 9788831799263, €35.
Questa pubblicazione, la terza di una collana specificatamente dedicata al collezionismo artistico a Venezia in età moderna, prende in esame il Settecento, il secolo definito della “gloria” di Venezia, particolarmente ricco e articolato per l’evoluzione del gusto e degli orientamenti del fenomeno, con elementi di continuità e altri di contrasto con l’epoca che lo precede. Composto da saggi tematici che illuminano tipologie di opere, aspetti e problemi del commercio artistico (anche in connessione con le conseguenze delle soppressioni delle corporazioni religiose), presenze forestiere di artisti, collezionisti e agenti, casi-studio di raccolte particolarmente significative per i loro proprietari (una casata di antica nobiltà e un facoltoso imprenditore della manifattura del tabacco) e la loro formazione, il volume è completato da un corpus di oltre quaranta voci biografiche su raccoglitori, mercanti, agenti, diplomatici e critici che hanno assunto un ruolo determinante nello sviluppo del collezionismo nel Settecento veneziano: accanto a personalità in parte conosciute, ne compaiono numerose altre dal profilo sinora indefinito nonostante la loro rilevanza nel panorama del tempo. Un’appendice di documenti inediti offre un campione rappresentativo delle diverse tipologie di fonti archivistiche disponibili, da quelle “classiche” quali inventari, testamenti e carteggi, ad altre prodotte da precise contingenze storiche, ad esempio i saccheggi compiuti nei palazzi veneziani nel 1797.
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Paolo Coen, Il Mercato Dei Quadri a Roma nel Diciottesimo Secolo: La Domanda, l’Offerta e la Circolazione delle Opere in un Grande Centro Artistico Europeo, 2 vols (Florence: Leo S. Olschki Editore, 2010), 816 pages, ISBN: 9788822258953), €80.
Il binomio arte-denaro, oggi persino ovvio, esisteva anche in passato, sebbene attraverso forme e meccanismi in parte differenti. Tradizionalmente uno dei centri del mercato pittorico fu Roma, meta prediletta di artisti e viaggiatori provenienti da ogni parte del globo. Il libro ricostruisce questo complesso fenomeno individuando un momento chiave nel diciottesimo secolo, quando la città, anche sulla scia del Grand Tour, vede ancor più aumentare il suo peso nei sistemi artistici d’Europa.
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