Papers by Vasily Rastorguev
Object provenance is often approached as a linear chain of ownership. Recent increasing interest ... more Object provenance is often approached as a linear chain of ownership. Recent increasing interest and research in art market studies—the dealers, mediators, advisors, taste makers, etc.—indicate the transaction of art and decorative art is anything but linear. This volume takes as its point of departure two of the most active agents of the late 19C: the German Wilhelm von Bode (1845-1929) and the Florentine Stefano Bardini (1836-1922), whose immensely successful careers depended upon vast and intricate social and professional networks which heavily overlapped. Both men were responsible for placing thousands of objects in public and private collections throughout Europe and America. Although both Bardini and Bode distinguished themselves in terms of sheer quantity of transactions and expertise, they also defined themselves by the high quality of the objects and the sophistication of their mutual global network. On the basis of archival material, the essays in this volume examine the minutiae of the behind-the-scene aspects of object transaction within their broader context. In doing so, they offer alternative areas of inquiry for the mapping of objects as they were exchanged over time and place.
The Italian Courtyard of the Moscow State Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts has for many years conserve... more The Italian Courtyard of the Moscow State Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts has for many years conserved the same outlook, familiar to visitors over the world and to generations of art history students and pupils. Under the staircase leading up, itself a free copy of its more famous counterpart in the Florentine Bargello, a dark plaster cast of a bronze bust representing a man in his sixties, draped in an imposing cloak, is placed casually between the life-size plaster copies of Michelangelo's David and Verrochio's Equestrian statue of Bartolomeo Colleoni (Fig. 2). While it would perhaps be unfair to pretend that the nondescript figure of the sitter attracts any kind of extraordinary attention to itself, the story behind it, upon closer scrutiny, is linked to several dramatic events that bear retelling in the following article. 1 The present-day interiors of this and other halls of the museum continue to reflect the deep reverence that Ivan Tsvetajev, the driving force and masterm...
Florence, Berlin and Beyond: Late Nineteenth-Century Art Markets and their Social Networks
Actual Problems of Theory and History of Art
Actual Problems of Theory and History of Art
The paper deals with the oddities and peculiarities of critical history of a bronze bust represen... more The paper deals with the oddities and peculiarities of critical history of a bronze bust representing Francesco del Nero (1487-1563). Formerly in the Kaiser-Friedrich-Museum, Berlin, and long considered lost in the fire of Friedrichshain bunker in May 1945, it has recently resurfaced in the Pushkin Museum, Moscow, in custody there since 1946. The dramatic history of the bust, acquired in 1895 for Berlin Museums by Wilhelm von Bode himself, is examined in detail, along with that of a plaster cast of the aforementioned work also in Moscow, acquired around 1899 in Berlin by the founder of the Moscow museum Ivan Tsvetaev. New material available at hand and a critical analysis of the sources allows the author to effectively challenge the attribution to Giulio Mazzoni from Piacenza (1525 – 1618), together with the long-held assumption of the bust being the original after which a marble effigy in the roman church of Santa Maria Minerva was made, thus raising important concerns about the work’s provenance and authenticity.
Jahrbuch Preußischer Kulturbesitz Bd. 51 / 2015
Organisation of seminars and conferences by Vasily Rastorguev
Le rovine di Berlino (dai due lati del muro) Ore 16.15 Paul Hofmann (Bode Museum, Berlino) Missed... more Le rovine di Berlino (dai due lati del muro) Ore 16.15 Paul Hofmann (Bode Museum, Berlino) Missed, lost, forgotten: war-damaged sculptures in focus after 70 years Coffee break Ore 17.15 Igor Borodin (Museo Statale delle Belle Arti A.S. Pushkin, Mosca) The "Donatello and other Renaissance masters" project: the next stage of the study, conservation and restoration of the objects from the transferred art collection in custudy of the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts Ore 18.00 Vasily Rastorguev (Museo Statale delle Belle Arti A.S. Pushkin, Mosca) Re-counting the losses. New discoveries in the deposits of the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow Ore 18.45 Discussione Berlino, maggio 1945. A guerra ormai finita, due furibondi incendi devastano il bunker dove una parte delle raccolte d'arte dei musei berlinesi è ricoverata. Settant'anni dopo, nel 2015, alcune sculture date per perse (inclusi capolavori di Donatello e Luca della Robbia) riaffiorano dai depositi del Museo Pushkin di Mosca: vi erano state trasferite fin dal 1946. Le sculture rimaste a Berlino e quelle ritrovate a Mosca pongono nuove sfide metodologiche e quesiti di ampio respiro: come e fino a che punto vanno restaurate? Come vanno presentate al pubblico? Ne parlano un conservatore e un restauratore del Bode Museum di Berlino insieme a un conservatore e un restauratore del Museo Pushkin di Mosca, oggi impegnati in un importante progetto congiunto. Grazie al quale, proprio in questi mesi, altre opere credute scomparse stanno tornando alla luce.
Publications by Vasily Rastorguev
Journal of the History of Collections, 2022
In recent years, studies in the history of collecting have seen a shift away from the monographic... more In recent years, studies in the history of collecting have seen a shift away from the monographic towards an investigation of social and professional networks. Born from a double session at the 2018 College Art Association conference, with further invited contributions, this weighty volume takes the networks of Berlin art historian Wilhelm von Bode and Florentine art dealer Stefano Bardini as its point of departure. As complex connections are teased out in fourteen case-studies presenting meticulous archival research, the provenances of the works of art under discussion are revealed to be 'anything but linear', as editor Lynn Catterson puts it at the outset. This volume is, in many ways, an ode to Bode, who was less prominent in Catterson's previous volume for Brill (Dealing Art on Both Sides of the Atlantic, 1860-1940, 2017). As Fulvia Zaninelli notes, to study Bode is to study dealers. Detailed analysis of Bode's correspondence forms the backbone of many of these discussions, which trace works of art from postunification Italy to their final resting places around the world. Jeremy Howard's presentation of Isabella Stewart Gardner's purchase of Botticelli's Chigi Madonna includes a timely aside on contemporary debates around art patrimony, which complicates the backdrop against which many of these transactions take place. Various terms are used to describe the individuals who penned these letters-agent, dealer, adviser, representative-and yet these figures often evade categorization. Paul Tucker, for example, describes how Charles Fairfax Murray had five roles with Agnew's: he was purchasing customer, vendor, restorer-copier, joint purchaser and sharer in profits, before he deliberately extracted himself from his obligations to the firm. The politics of remuneration thread throughout the volume, as scholar-agents Bernard Berenson and Harold Woodbury Parsons, and Roman 'amateur'
Gotik -Der Paderborner Dom und die Baukultur des 13. Jahrhunderts in Europa, 2018
A note in the exhibition catalogue Gotik -Der Paderborner Dom und die Baukultur des 13. Jahrhunde... more A note in the exhibition catalogue Gotik -Der Paderborner Dom und die Baukultur des 13. Jahrhunderts in Europa. Katalog zur Ausstellung im Erzbischoeflichen Dioezesanmuseum Paderborn, herausgegeben von Christof Stiegemann
Object provenance is often approached as a linear chain of ownership. Recent increasing interest... more Object provenance is often approached as a linear chain of ownership. Recent increasing interest and research in art market studies—the dealers, mediators, advisors, taste makers, etc.—indicate the transaction of art and decorative art is anything but linear. This volume takes as its point of departure two of the most active agents of the late 19C: the German Wilhelm von Bode (1845-1929) and the Florentine Stefano Bardini (1836-1922), whose immensely successful careers depended upon vast and intricate social and professional networks which heavily overlapped. Both men were responsible for placing thousands of objects in public and private collections throughout Europe and America. Although both Bardini and Bode distinguished themselves in terms of sheer quantity of transactions and expertise, they also defined themselves by the high quality of the objects and the sophistication of their mutual global network. On the basis of archival material, the essays in this volume examine the minutiae of the behind-the-scene aspects of object transaction within their broader context. In doing so, they offer alternative areas of inquiry for the mapping of objects as they were exchanged over time and place.
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Papers by Vasily Rastorguev
Organisation of seminars and conferences by Vasily Rastorguev
Publications by Vasily Rastorguev