11 July 2006 | Baroque/Neoclassical
The 400th-anniversary Amsterdam exhibition Rembrandt – Quest of a Genius addresses serious scholarly questions, writes Manfred Schwarz in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung. How to explain the Night Watch, so different from the meditative, sentimental pictures of its era? (Peter Greenaway’s film Nightwatching appropriately compares it to corrupt, greasy 1920s-Chicago, though the analogy only goes so [...]
19 June 2006 | Baroque/Neoclassical
With Ingres recently featured at the Louvre, Didier Rykner took the opportunity to review eight recent Ingres-related books. He can’t accept Allard and Chaudonneret’s claim that the master overturned the hierarchy of genres, or that his small paintings from the late 1810s are not troubadour pictures, but he praises Stéphane Guégan for questioning the taboo [...]
12 May 2006 | Architecture, Baroque/Neoclassical
Michelangelo, fine, but amid all the St. Peter’s anniversary hubbub let’s not neglect Carlo Maderno, writes Axel Christoph Gampp. The much-maligned architect hasn’t received much attention since Howard Hibbard’s 1972 study, but Gampp takes up the cudgels for him.
10 May 2006 | Baroque/Neoclassical
From the L.A. Times: It’s the “Andromeda Chained to the Rock, credited for more than 150 years to the Flemish master Anthony Van Dyck. The Ahmanson Foundation acquired it in 1985 as a 20th birthday present to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, which put it up right away. ‘It sends chills up and [...]
1 May 2006 | Baroque/Neoclassical, Books
Martin Warnke’s new book on Velázquez elaborates his conception of the artist as a paragon of artistic freedom. A riposte to Carl Justi’s and José López-Rey’s version of biographical art history, this book takes multiple approaches, tackling the economic decline of the Spanish court; jester and dwarf depiction as an anti-courtly impulse and a lesson [...]
27 April 2006 | Baroque/Neoclassical, Contemporary
More art-historically informed comment on the Mohammed cartoons controversy: In the Frankfurter Allgemeine, Damian Dombrowski writes that the roots of modern caricature can be found in Bernini’s drawings, a cultural achievement that shouldn’t be confused with a blanket license to injure.
3 April 2006 | Baroque/Neoclassical
According to the Times of London, “The authenticity of up to 60 paintings attributed to Rubens has been called into doubt after the expertise of the art historian responsible for authenticating them was questioned. Ludwig Burchard was one of the most respected scholars of the 20th century, revered for his knowledge of Rubens. But almost [...]
27 March 2006 | Baroque/Neoclassical, Books
In his new, intimately detailed Bernini biography, Arne Karsten evokes the artist’s role in the history of Baroque Rome, writes reviewer Dirk Schümer in the Frankfurter Allgemeine. He describes how the Piazza Navona fountain, for instance, symbolized papal world domination (showing the Rio de la Plata, Danube, Nile, and Ganges) just as the Peace of [...]
13 March 2006 | Baroque/Neoclassical, Books
According to S.A. Mansbach, Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann’s new Painterly Enlightenment: The Art of Franz Anton Maulbertsch, 1724–1796 “is a monumental book … one of the most carefully considered methodological assessments, historical [analyses], and art historical interpretations of eighteenth-century Central European culture to have appeared in the last half-century … equally impressive is the author’s literary [...]
13 March 2006 | Baroque/Neoclassical
According to the Mumbai Mirror, restorers at the Prince of Wales Museum recently attributed an eighteenth-century Sword of Damocles to Antoine Dubost (1769-1825), whose work has been attracting renewed interest and higher auction prices in recent years. “A saga of jealousy that could rival a soap opera lies behind it,” remarked conservator Abraham Joel. Dubost’s [...]
