1 July 2010 | Conferences, Islamic, Pre-Columbian, Renaissance
On July 9th, the Institut national d’histoire de l’art in Paris will present “1500-1600. Entre Islam et Nouveaux Mondes: les réformes dans un contexte global,” in the Salle Walter Benjamin of the Galerie Colbert. The event aims to extend the Reformation’s questions of “idolatry” beyond the European context, and consider well-known Reformation images within a broader frame [...]
28 June 2010 | Architecture, Medieval, Renaissance
In the Wall Street Journal, Jay Pridmore considers Florence’s Ponte Vecchio: When the morning sun reaches across the Arno and hits the varied ochre tones, the whole bridge glows as one in the hazeless Florentine light. Visually, distinct elements weave together like immutable strands— genius, commerce and tyranny, to name three big ones—of the Florentine [...]
27 May 2010 | Renaissance
Plants in renaissance paintings usually have religious associations, but seldom if ever connections with mind-expanding drugs. Now, David Bellamy of Sotheby’s has decided that a plant held by a satyr in Botticelli’s canonical ‘Venus and Mars’ has hallucinogenic properties. After consulting with horticultural experts at Kew Gardens, Bellamy maintains that it is Datura stramonium – [...]
12 May 2010 | Books, Modern, Renaissance, Theory
I am fascinated by the systems through which art is deemed legitimate, and I taught a course on fakes and frauds this past January. The premise was that we can learn about how art is produced, controlled, and valued by focusing on taboo objects. Sometimes such scrutiny will result in a reattribution, such as the one [...]
7 May 2010 | Books, Renaissance
In the April 2010 issue of The Art Newspaper, Sylvia Ferino reviews Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann’s book Arcimboldo: Visual Jokes, Natural History, and Still-life Painting: Since the most recent exhibitions devoted to Arcimboldo, in Paris and Vienna in 2007-8, his composite heads of “The Four Seasons” series, 1573, in the Louvre are said to have become [...]
25 April 2010 | Architecture, Renaissance
Three recent reviews and essays on the Renaissance: Colm Tóibín on the stubbornness of Lorenzo Lotto, Rachel Spence on early Renaissance art in Siena, and Nicolai Ouroussoff on “Palladio and His Legacy” at the Morgan Library.
10 March 2010 | Baroque/Neoclassical, Renaissance
From The New York Times: By at least one amusing new metric, Michelangelo’s unofficial 500-year run at the top of the Italian art charts has ended … That’s according to an art historian at the University of Toronto, Philip Sohm. He has studied the number of writings (books, catalogs and scholarly papers) on both of [...]
12 February 2010 | Conferences, Renaissance
On March 6 a symposium on French Renaissance art will convene at NYU in honor of art historian Colin Eisler. This is apparently where Gregory Hedberg will present his argument for the new Degas plasters (although it’s not clear what that topic has to do with French Renaissance art). The full roster: Thomas Crow Rosalie [...]
9 February 2010 | Renaissance, Teaching
Connecticut College professor Robert Baldwin has decided to place online a large proportion of everything he’s ever written, 200 essays, lectures, bibliographies, and interdisciplinary syllabi on Western Art with a focus on European art, 1300-1700. This web site is aimed at ABDs and recent PhDs struggling to work up new courses, hunt down primary source [...]
22 December 2009 | Museums, Renaissance
According to ArtDaily, an Italian exhibition that brings together reputed Giorgiones has aroused controversy among scholars and art historians … [Castelfranco Veneto] is staging a wide-ranging exhibition … from December 12 [2009] to April 11, 2010 … The exhibition, a challenge both from the scientific and the organizational points of view … is curated by [...]
11 November 2009 | Renaissance
From The Telegraph: One of the charms of the world’s most famous painting is that she appears radiant one moment and then serious and sardonic the next. Now scientists claim to have come up with an answer to her changing moods – our eyes are sending mixed signals to the brain. They believe Mona Lisa’s [...]
30 October 2009 | Renaissance
Didier Rykner reads the Italian newspapers and wonders how it could be true that Giorgio Vasari’s archives, held in his native city of Arezzo and belonging to the Museo Casa Vasari, a private museum whose owner, Count Giovanni Festari, passed away a few days ago, could have been sold for the extravagant sum of 150 [...]
13 October 2009 | Renaissance
A small portrait, the object of considerable controversy over recent years, is increasingly attributed to Leonardo, reports the Guardian: The small picture of a young woman in profile was previously believed to be a German work from the early 19th century and has changed hands in recent years for around £12,000. But a growing number [...]
27 May 2009 | Books, Renaissance
In caa.reviews, Susan Donahue Kuretsky considers Christopher S. Wood’s Forgery, Replica, Fiction: Temporalities of German Renaissance Art: Wood’s study attempts in part to redress limitations in traditional formulations of the Renaissance (familiarly defined in relationship to Italy) as a myth of rebirth, repetition, and revival of classical antiquity in art following a dark period of [...]
11 May 2009 | Medieval, Museums, Renaissance
Recently arrived in our inbox: MEDIEVAL AND RENAISSANCE EXHIBITIONS IN EUROPE AND NORTH AMERICA, SUMMER 2009 An incomplete list, compiled by Nick Herman [Ph.D. Candidate, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University] Belgium Charles the Bold Groeninge Museum, Bruges, 27 March-21 July Canada From Raphael to Caracci: The Art of Papal Rome Ottawa, National Gallery [...]
30 April 2009 | Museums, Renaissance
Contra Vasari, Perugino and Florence weren’t the sole significant influences on the young Raphael. The artist’s father, Giovanni Santi, as well the Montefeltro court, had a positive impact too; so argues an exhibition at the Palazzo Ducale in Urbino. The exhibition presents research partly based on documents from the Santi family bottega newly uncovered in [...]
15 April 2009 | Museums, Renaissance
On view in Arezzo: “The Della Robbia Family: The Dialogue Among the Arts In the Renaissance.” Three generations of the family were known for raising the status of glazed terracotta to a par with painting and sculpture; Alberti credited patriarch Luca with “inventing” the technique. The show has been reviewed by Goffredo Silvestri (“The most [...]
30 March 2009 | Conservation, Renaissance
Milan’s Brera Gallery has completed its restoration of Raphael’s The Wedding of the Virgin, according to Reuters: The painting’s surface had darkened considerably in the 150 years since the last major restoration. It also underwent small repairs in 1958 after a visitor attacked it with a hammer, injuring the Virgin’s stomach and elbow … The [...]
28 February 2009 | Conferences, Medieval, Modern, Renaissance
Allyson Drucker reports from CAA: You would have been hard-pressed to find the geographic and temporal boundaries that academics have traditionally abided by in two of this morning’s sessions where, instead, panelists focused on the points of intersection among art and artists hailing from different milieux. At “The International Contribution to Renaissance and Baroque Art” [...]
27 February 2009 | Conferences, News, Renaissance
Our contributor Allyson Drucker writes: The topic of this morning’s session “Renaissance and/or Early Modern: Naming and/or Knowing the Past” promised to travel some well-rehearsed territory for scholars of the field who remain dissatisfied with the term early modern as a substitute for “renaissance” and its troubling connotations. And while the session as a whole [...]
