Stored safely in a medallion cabinet in the reserves of Hôtel Turgot in Paris, the Fondation Custodia's collection of portrait miniatures leads an existence hidden away from the public eye. This exquisite, two volume publication gives access to this distinguished collection for the first time.
Frits Lugt (1884-1970) had a passion for miniatures that began early on in his life. He demonstrated it in the small but ardent Le portrait-miniature of 1917, the year in which he bought the first portrait miniature for his collection. Since then it has been constantly enriched, and now numbers more than 100 works by artists from Great Britain, the Low Countries, France, Germany, Italy, Denmark and Switzerland, covering the period from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries.
Thanks to the expertise of specialist Karen Schaffers-Bodenhausen, who has studied the growing collection in recent years with great dedication and patience, we now have this first catalogue of the portrait miniatures in the Frits Lugt Collection, Fondation Custodia, Paris.
In addition to a foreword by director Ger Luijten, the first volume contains detailed descriptions and exhaustive analyses of the portraits, their attributions, and identifications of the sitters. The author also examines the techniques employed and sets out to establish a date for each portrait. The volume closes with a table of concordance, a detailed index of proper names and a comprehensive bibliography.
Comparative illustrations are incorporated in the descriptions. The second volume has colour plates of all the works in the collection, almost all of them full size, and concludes with reproductions of the backs of the miniatures if they provide additional supporting information.
Qualifié de « grand poète » par l'auteur américain Henry James, Titian reste l'un des peintres les plus célèbres de l'art occidental. Depuis sa mort en 1576, sa réputation est restée intacte. Pendant l'Age Doré de l'Amérique, les tableaux de Titian atteignirent une valeur inégalable pour les plus grands collectionneurs et notamment aux yeux d'Isabella Stewart Gardner. En 1896, elle acquit son chef d'oeuvre, The Rape of Europa. Il devint l'unique exemple de son cycle de poésie renommé hors Europe, inspirant une galerie entière dans son musée récemment construit et contribuant au tollé de l'Angleterre au sujet de la perte de ses trésors d'art. Etant le premier dédié à Europa, ce livre raconte l'histoire de la peinture a l'époque de Gardner et de Titian et nous offre de rares aperçus des techniques de virtuose de l'artiste.
Accompanying an exhibition at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, this catalogue explores one of the most important but historically neglected painters of the Italian Renaissance, Carlo Crivelli (c. 1435-c. 1495). Venetian by birth but shaped by formative experiences in Padua, Crivelli embarked on a career that spanned both sides of the Adriatic. His extraordinary success led to a virtual monopoly in the Marches, where he dominated the market for towering altarpieces and jewel-like paintings for private devotion in the second half of the fi fteenth century. Pushing the boundaries between painting and sculpture, his works are distinguished by their radically expressive compositions, luxuriant ornamental display and bravura illusionism.
Seven essays challenge the prevailing view of Crivelli as a provincial artist working in an anachronistic 'Gothic' style, investigate the remarkable facture of his paintings, and shed new light on his rediscovery by collectors. Repositioning Crivelli's contributions within wider developments in the history of western art, Stephen J. Campbell (Johns Hopkins University), C. Jean Campbell (Emory University), Thomas Golsenne (École Nationale Supérieure d'Art de Nice), and Alison Wright (University College London) reveal his artistic ambition.
Crivelli is reevaluated as an experimental artist who masterfully manipulated the surfaces of his paintings into visionary encounters with the divine, forged a modern icon, and off ered a powerful alternative to new models of painting associated with Florence. Gianfranco Pocobene (Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum) examines the technical facility that underpins Crivelli's dazzling pictorial eff ects and publishes the results of the fi rst ever technical analysis on the Gardner's Saint George and the Dragon. Essays by Francesco De Carolis (Università di Bologna) and Oliver Tostmann (Wadsworth Athenaeum) investigate the painter's critical fortunes. The former explores the dispersal of Crivelli's works in nineteenth-century Italy and their role in shaping his modern reputation, while the latter examines the American taste for Crivelli in the early twentieth century.
The catalogue refl ects the iconographic range of his images. Entries written by a team of scholars in Europe and the United States include new insights and up-to-date bibliography for twenty-three paintings and Crivelli's only surviving drawing on paper.
This beautiful and extensively illustrated catalogue presents in-depth case studies of twenty-four rare and remarkable Late Medieval panel paintings, many from the German-speaking regions of Europe, but also from Spain, France and the Southern Netherlands. These works - often fragments of larger altarpieces designed for liturgical performance and communal or private devotion - can be monumental and dramatic or small and intimate, but all on close examination prove to be rich in meaning - even in cases where the painters remain anonymous, and the precise contexts of their creation have become obscured or fragmented.
The collected essays will encompass a broad spectrum of artistic styles, techniques, and interests, including in some instances the works' original frames, and the attendant meanings they give to the imagery housed within. The group will also be augmented by a rare and important small-scale tapestry altarpiece with close links to panel painting. The inclusion of such a piece, one of the many newly resurfaced works to be included in the catalogue, will off er an innovative approach to the scholarship of Medieval paintings, and enrich our understanding of the cross-pollination of ideas between mediums and the role played by painters in tapestry production at the turn of the sixteenth century.
The book, a follow-up to Susie Nash's important 2011 catalogue, considers the physical history, original form, condition and technique of the assembled works, using wood analysis and dendrochronology, paint samples, infra-red, x-rays and macro photography to document the materials and methods involved in their making and the alterations and transformations they have undergone with time. This new information is combined with close readings of their imagery and its presentation to explore issues of meaning, creative process, patronal intervention and artistic intention, leading in many cases to new reconstructions, attributions, dates and iconographic readings.
The text is extensively illustrated with a series of images of all of the works, along with technical photographs and comparative material.
Stanley Spencer's patrons have never before been studied collectively. Drawing on archival research and conversations with Spencer's family and descendants of patrons, this exciting new publication looks at how collecting habits were affected by war and economic change, and how - even though Spencer was truly idiosyncratic - his patrons influenced the man and his art.
Patron Saints: Collecting Stanley Spencer is a revealing new exhibition at the renowned Stanley Spencer Gallery in Cookham - Spencer's spiritual home and major source of inspiration. The exhibition draws together a spectacular collection of loans, including The Centurion's Servant (Tate); Love on the Moor (Fitzwilliam); John Donne Arriving in Heaven, (Fitzwilliam) and one work not seen in the public domain in over 50 years.
The exhibition and catalogue examine the often complex relationships between Spencer and his patrons and what drove them to collect his work. Spencer was a single-minded genius, but the influence of his patrons on his painting is far greater than has hitherto been realised.
At the turn of the century, collecting art was no longer the preserve of the aristocracy and the upper classes, but Spencer's art appealed to a broad spectrum of art lovers, fellow artists, businessmen and politicians. Many of his patrons lived in Cookham, where he lived and found artistic inspiration, and many of his paintings were influenced by his spiritual feelings for that place. His idiosyncratic and deeply personal approach gave him a wide and enduring appeal, and he was patronised by some of the most important cultural figures and taste-makers of that time.
Curator Amanda Bradley comments, «Behind Stanley Spencer, one of the greatest Modern British artists, were a group of individuals who enabled his very existence - both artistically and emotionally. They were not wildly rich, but they were powerful, cultivated, intellectual and artistic. Some bought on spec, others were true patrons, giving him the freedom to fulfil his artistic genius. Most fostered long-lived relationships with the artist, influencing his life and work more than has hitherto been realised. These were the patron saints.» Patron Saints: Collecting Stanley Spencer explores the emergence of Spencer as an artistic personality, looking at those who helped him and why he - and his popularity - was a product of the zeitgeist (first half of the twentieth century) characterised by social and economic anxiety.
Amanda Bradley is an independent art historian and Trustee of the Stanley Spencer Gallery. She co-curated Stanley Spencer: Heaven in a Hell of War, and has published extensively on Spencer's work at Burghclere.
Pevsner calls it 'marvellous'. Yet the reredos of the fifteenth-century chapel of All Souls College, Oxford, with its combination of medieval niches and statuary by George Gilbert Scott, has remained one of the unsung glories of both medieval perpendicular architecture and Victorian restoration. Informed by recent scientific investigation of its stonework and its surviving medieval polychromy, this volume traces for the first time the entire history of the reredos in its architectural and religious context - from the phases of its medieval and early Tudor construction, through its covering up with a succession of baroque and neoclassical decorative schemes, to its uncovering and restoration in the 1870s.
The book provides a novel and revealing vantage point on the artistic, cultural and ecclesiological history of Britain across four centuries.
