4 February 2009 | Baroque/Neoclassical, Books
We belatedly take note of Annick Lemoine’s Nicolas Régnier winning the latest book prize of the Syndicat National des Antiquaires. The Art Tribune‘s Didier Rykner writes: … a remarkable monographic study, both erudite and pleasantly readable, which is the fruit of many long years of research and of a very subtle knowledge of the period. [...]
16 January 2009 | Baroque/Neoclassical, Museums
Lee Rosenbaum writes: What’s that new addition to the Metropolitan Museum’s old masters galleries, catty-cornered with the museum’s iconic Vermeer, “Woman with a Water Pitcher”? Let’s approach for a closer look: Vermeer, “Young Woman Seated at a Virginal,” Private Collection … Until Sotheby’s had reported (in advance of the 2004 sale) the favorable findings of [...]
9 January 2009 | Baroque/Neoclassical, Contemporary
In an interview with the Frankfurter Rundschau, art historian Horst Bredekamp discusses Abu Ghraib, Bush, Sept. 11, the case of the Bulgarian art historian Martina Baleva, Darwin, Abraham Bosse, The Matrix, and more: Le Brun’s contemporary Abraham Bosse taught perspective at the Paris Academy. He was let go because he took it too literally. In [...]
1 December 2008 | Baroque/Neoclassical
According to ANSA, Caravaggio’s reputation for revolutionary artistic genius has received a further boost following the discovery he may have used fireflies to create primitive ”photographs”. Roberta Lapucci, conservation chief at the Florence-based SACI institute, believes the baroque artist created a firefly powder as an essential tool after converting his entire studio into a kind [...]
16 October 2008 | Baroque/Neoclassical, Museums
From Smithsonian: … despite his artistic stature, Bernini is only now receiving his first major American exhibition—at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles (through October 26) and then at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa (November 28, 2008-March 8, 2009). One explanation for the oversight is obvious, says Catherine Hess, associate curator [...]
10 April 2008 | Baroque/Neoclassical, Museums
“Poussin and Nature: Arcadian Visions” is now on view at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art; Bloomberg News has an entertaining short interview with “the Met’s Keith Christiansen, who curated the exhibition with Pierre Rosenberg, the retired director of the Louvre”: Hoelterhoff: In pulling this show together, did you make any discoveries? Christiansen: I think [...]
3 April 2008 | Baroque/Neoclassical, Books
In the February 2008 issue of The Burlington Magazine, Xander van Eck reviews Eric Jan Sluijter’s Rembrandt and the Female Nude: … the scope of [Rembrandt's] genius was such that it still yields genuinely new research, providing that valid questions are asked. Eric Jan Sluijter has done just that in Rembrandt and the Female Nude, [...]
21 February 2008 | Baroque/Neoclassical, Museums
From the Telegraph: During his lifetime, the Roman painter Pompeo Batoni was among the most celebrated artists in Europe, counting several popes among his patrons as well as Frederick the Great and Catherine of Russia. But only two years after his death in 1787, Sir Joshua Reynolds predicted that Batoni’s name would quickly fall into [...]
5 February 2008 | Baroque/Neoclassical
The Sacramento Bee writes on a recent TV ad for Orangina: … This has got to be one of the weirdest spots to air in quite a while. With a soundtrack of pulsing dance pop, here are some of the images we see: A flamingo in a G-string, sliding down a vine as if it [...]
5 June 2007 | Baroque/Neoclassical
Need a dissertation topic? In the Spring 2007 Renaissance Quarterly, Ann Jensen Adams welcomes two recent books on Rembrandt’s portraits, but finds that still more work needs to be done. In particular, the long-beloved late “half-length introspective figures created in broad strokes brown and ochre … raise important and as yet unanswered questions about contemporaneous [...]
31 May 2007 | Baroque/Neoclassical, Medieval, Renaissance
In the February 2007 Renaissance Studies, Victoria Kirkham reviews Patrizia Bettella’s The Ugly Woman: Transgressive Aesthetic Models in Italian Poetry from the Middle Ages to the Baroque. One chapter “devotes generous space to the ‘guardian,’ since whatever her incarnation — as duenna, chaperone, governess — her function is to ‘guard’ and ‘regard,’ that is, to [...]
30 May 2007 | Baroque/Neoclassical
In the latest issue of Seventeenth-Century News (64:3&4), Maureen E. Mulvihill reviews the Van Dyck catalogue raisonné edited by Susan J. Barnes, Nora De Poorter, Oliver Millar, and Horst Vey. Only recently, she writes, “have art historians been in place to confidently compile a ‘complete’ catalogue raisonné of Van Dyck’s paintings. This handsomely produced catalogue, [...]
19 May 2007 | Baroque/Neoclassical, Renaissance
David Packwood laments the installation of Craig Clunas as chair of History of Art at Oxford University: “Nobody is better qualified than Clunas to bring a fresh perspective onto the programmes at Oxford University; he has written trenchant books and articles on Chinese art and culture and is admirably suited to ‘join up the dots’, [...]
25 April 2007 | Baroque/Neoclassical, Books
In CAA Reviews, John Beldon Scott considers Evonne Levy’s Propaganda and the Jesuit Baroque: “Evonne Levy argues that art historians peremptorily dismiss totalitarian art because we judge it to be mere propaganda and therefore not worthy of consideration. Asserting that there is no such thing as ‘mere propaganda,’ her provocative and insightful book on the [...]
12 March 2007 | Baroque/Neoclassical
From The Art Newspaper: “In a brilliant piece of art historical detective work, two Dutch academics have solved the puzzle of Jan Steen’s 1655 painting The Burgomaster of Delft and His Daughter. The work does not depict a burgomaster, but the merchant who supplied grain for the artist’s brewery. We also now know about a [...]
28 February 2007 | Baroque/Neoclassical
According to ADNKronosInternational, the Italian press is reporting that “Italy’s baroque painting genius Michelangelo Merisi might not have been born in the northern town of Caravaggio, the name by which he is universally known, but in Milan. The astounding discovery has reportedly just been made not by an art historian but by a pensioner, a [...]
27 February 2007 | Baroque/Neoclassical, Books
In the Feb. 2007 Artforum, Arthur Danto reviews T.J. Clark’s The Sight of Death, which Clark wrote after spending half a year before two Poussin paintings: “all this is pure association, and it is a pretty meager havest for six months of intense looking … the experiment ought not to have just awakened personal associations, [...]
25 January 2007 | Baroque/Neoclassical
From the Guardian: “It is one of a mysterious group of works that has intrigued art historians for many years. They are all sensitive character studies of predominantly New Testament figures, but it has remained unclear why they were painted. This portrayal of Saint James the Greater is the only one of Rembrandt’s late religious [...]
14 November 2006 | Baroque/Neoclassical
From The Telegraph: “The Calling of Saints Peter and Andrew, owned by the Royal Family for almost 400 years, has lain unloved and seldom seen in a storeroom at Hampton Court for decades. Misattributed as a copy of a Caravaggio by an unknown hand, it was valued in thousands rather than millions. The Royal Collection, [...]
4 October 2006 | Baroque/Neoclassical, Museums
From the AP: “The Baroque-era painter Annibale Carracci – underpaid during his lifetime and under-appreciated for centuries after his death – is enjoying a posthumous renaissance in his native Italy. What is described as his first solo show opened [recently] at Bologna’s Civic Archaeological Museum. Entitled simply ‘Annibale Carracci,’ the show works to dispel the [...]
