The Burlington Magazine

ALTHOUGH BY THE mid-1950s Picasso was widely considered the most important artist in the world, for Franco's regime in Spain he was a political enemy who, only in time, might be accepted for his great achievements, as long as the painter refrained from expressing his political opposition to the regime. Picasso's life had not been characterised by a heavy involvement in politics. As a young man in Barcelona he had frequented several anarchist circles, but this was not particularly significant until the outbreak of the Civil War. During the 1930s he was scarcely known to the general public in Spain, even though he was very much admired by a younger generation that had matured in the 1920s. In 1936 a small exhibition of his work, organised by the Asociación de Amigos de las Artes Nuevas (ADLAN), was held in Barcelona and Madrid. It was not, however, an initiative of the Spanish government. 1 The painter's political commitment began with the Spanish Civil War when he was named director of the Museo del Prado. He accepted the appointment but never took up the post, nor did he visit Spain at that time. On the occasion of the 1937 Paris World's Fair, Picasso was commissioned to paint Guernica for the pavilion of the Spanish Republic and exhib ited alongside works by Julio González, Joan Miró and Alexander Calder. These well-known circumstances form the background of what happened after the Civil War. Picasso was considered to be an enemy of the regime and of Spain itself, although, with the passage of time, his enormous significance was gradually accepted. Until 1964 the only painting by Picasso in a collection belonging to the Spanish state was his early Woman in blue (1901; Fig.21). 2 The painter had not retrieved it after it was shown in the National Exhibition of Fine Arts that took place in Madrid in 1901 and it remained forgotten in the storerooms of the Museum of Modern Art in Madrid. Nevertheless, Picasso's mythical status by then was a permanent source of attraction for young Spanish artists, even though his direct influence had diminished after 1945. In this respect it is worth noting Antoni Tàpies's remarks on the occasion of their first meeting: 'I saw him in 1950 when I was in Paris on a scholarship. For me, Picasso was a kind of symbol that, in its political aspect, explained to me what had happened in this country, something that was not clear to us young people because the victors had always distorted everything. Both Picasso and Miró were the ones who put us on the alert and made us begin to question certain things [.. .] Picasso's example encouraged me to study the period of the Republic'. 3

The article discusses 18th-century Italian painter Bernardo Bellotto's 1740s career in Florence, Italy, and the role of artist Anton Maria Zanetti the Elder in promoting Bellotto. The author discusses nobleman Andrea Gerini's invitation for Bellotto to visit Tuscany and discusses Zanetti as an artistic advisor to Gerini. Other topics include Bellotto's Venetian-style view, or "vedute," paintings and the possible employment of artist Giuseppe Zocchi by Gerini.

embraced intensive patterning and ornamentation in their paintings, collages and large-scale installations as a means of disrupting received histories of abstraction, high art and good taste. They engaged in an ongoing critique of what constituted the definition of 'minor' or 'secondary' in relation to the patterns, compositions and source materials they used in their work. The second, better-known group (here referred to as simply 'Pictures') takes its name from Douglas Crimp's generative exhibition of the same

William Blake and popular religious imagery IT has long been established that Blake's designs are full of borrowings from earlier art and that traces can be found in particular of the influence of the Italian renaissance and classical antiquity. In his extensive and unveiled use of such sources Blake is at one with contemporary historypainters like James Barry and Henry Fuseli, whom Blake saw as fellow-martyrs in the struggle against the domination of Reynolds. Yet it is equally clear that he had hopes of reaching an audience beyond those with the cultural background to understand the Elevated Style. Reynolds had conceived of history-painting as restricted to the classically educated, to whom 'the great events of Greek and Roman fable and history ... [were by] early education and the usual course of reading,. .. made familiar and interesting'. Blake on the other hand persistently claimed that all men could find the path to redemption through his art and was 'happy to find a Great Majority of Fellow Mortals who can Elucidate My Visions, & Particularly they have been Elucidated by Children, who have taken a greater delight in contemplating my Pictures than I even hoped'.2 This concern to reach a wide and even uncultured audience is evident in the form of many of his productions, particularly the Illuminated Books. Though Blake scholars have rightly tended to emphasise the sophistication of his first works in illuminated printing, they would probably have been taken by Blake's contemporaries to belong to the world of popular publishing. The tracts There is No Natural Religion and All Religions are One, with their irregular printing, indistinct illustrations and small size, would have looked like a kind of chapbook, while the Songs of Innocence bear more than a passing resemblance to the moralising children's books published byJohn Newbury, as has often been noted. In some cases the visual imagery of Blake's early tracts, songs and works specifically directed towards children can be related to children's books earlier than the 'enlightened' moral tales popularised by Newbury. To take one example, the motif of the child reaching out for a creature just beyond its grasp that appears in There is no Natural Religion, series a, II and V (Fig.2), and the child killing humanised creatures in the Gates of Paradise, No.7 must have their origin in the woodcut to Emblem XXII of Divine Emblems: or Temporal Things Spiritualised, which was a version, first illustrated in the early eighteenth century, of John Bunyan's Book for Boys and Girls. This work was reprinted endlessly throughout the eighteenth century and 'Discourse IV, line 28. 2Letter to Dr Trusler, 23rd August 1799, in G.L. KEYNES: Blake Complete Writings, Oxford [1957], pp.793-94. 3D.v. ERDMAN: The Notebook of William Blake, Oxford [1973], p.92. 4See M.D. PALEY: 'William Blake, The Prince of the Hebrews, and The Woman Clothed with the Sun', in M.D. PALEY and M. PHILLIPS ed. William Blake: Essays in honour of Sir Geoffrey Keynes, Oxford [1973], pp.260-94.

... 18 Soltykoff preferred his objectsto have a 'complete' look; see Brennan, op ... This trans adantic link is not without irony, giventhe fact that Consuelo's tastes were shaped bythose of her mother,Alva Erskine Smith Vanderbilt, whose 'Gothic Room' at Marble House, Newport, Rhode ...

THERE HAS BEEN a great upsurge in the study of nineteenthcentury painting materials in recent decades but, in contrast to pigment research, the analysis of canvas types has been relatively modest. 1 That is not entirely unexpected. Until now the characterisation of canvas thread density has been based on a few hand counts made across the canvas in question, which so often depend upon the availability of an X-radiograph in the case of paintings that have been lined. This is a tedious business and, moreover, there has been no generally agreed method for acquiring, archiving or comparing thread count information on a broader scale. In addition, hand counting had the disadvantage of not being totally accurate, since the spot counts made might not be representative for the entire canvas. It was the goal of the Thread Count Automation Project (TCAP), which started in 2007, to determine the thread density from X-radiographs of paintings on canvas with the help of computers. Although there are many roads leading to Rome, the mathematics of Fourier spectral analysis have been used for the automation. 2 Here, the intensity waveform visible in an X-radiograph indicating the light and dark transitions between thread centres and thread edges can be converted into a thread density (count) for each local evaluation square (typically 1 cm. square) across the entire surface of the canvas in question. Colour-coded maps of the computed thread densities revealed that the weaving process itself results in the thread density showing a tendency to remain relatively fixed for a bundle of threads traversing the canvas along the thread direction. Thus, maps of the local density of the horizontally oriented threads show horizontal stripes of different colours, and a striped pattern is visible in the density maps of vertical threads as well (Figs.26-28). This makes it possible to identify aligned pieces of canvas from the same original roll by their matching striped patterns, in the direction of both warp (here taken to be vertical, corresponding to the length of the roll) and weft (here taken to be horizontal, corresponding to the width of the roll). The consistency of the weaving process means that this weave match capability in the warp direction can identify pieces that were not necessarily adjacent on the original roll but simply shared threads that continued through the length of the fabric. On the other hand, the paintings that line up in the weft direction can only have been adjacent on the original roll. The project started at the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, with an analysis of Van Gogh's paintings in its collection, 3 and although the study has been expanded to include canvases by other artists from different collections, it is the study of Van Gogh's oeuvre that remains one of the main pillars underpinning the development and application of automated thread counting This article has been translated from the Dutch by Michael Hoyle. All F numbers citing works by Vincent van Gogh refer to J.-B. de la Faille:

the master drawings, which are mosdy arranged by school and alphabetically by artist. In recent years original design drawings have increasingly become a subject of study, particularly when associated with known artists or designers. An exceptionally early unpublished sheet has recendy come to light. The work in question is a fragmentary two-sided pen drawing (inv. no.2328), in brown ink on vellum, depicting on its recto a repeating pattern of plant forms with fantastic creatures copied from, or inspired by, oriental silks (Fig.20), and on its verso, a variety of designs and motifs, including a decorative roundel (trimmed by the margin of the sheet at the top and left edges), three ducks, a stylised wave effect, two hares (from a trio arranged in a triangular config uration also trimmed at the left edge), some vegetation and the Holy Ghost shown as a dove descending (Fig.22). The relevant register of drawings acquired by the South Kensington Museum describes this sheet as 'Silk ...

The authenticity of a cabinet in the J. Paul Getty Museum collection that was said to be a 16th-century Burgundian piece came under doubt in the late 20th century due to its excellent state of preservation and uniform patina, and it was relabeled a 19th-century forgery. In 2001, at the time of an exhibit of the work of Hugues Sambin at the Musée National de la Renaissance (Ecouen, France), the Getty piece was compared favorably to a Sambin cabinet with an unbroken provenance. This led to a serious reinvestigation of the Getty piece, in which both physical and documentary evidence were studied. All evidence suggested that the cabinet was an authentic piece with a replacement base and a new finish. The authors discuss the results of the investigation focusing on the structure and construction of the cabinet and replacement parts and finishes. Dendrochronological analysis and radiocarbon dating were among the analytical techniques used to study the cabinet.

A hitherto unknown drawing, entitled The sacrifice to the unknown god, in the collection of Old Master drawings at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes of Santiago de Chile, can be attributed with confidence to the young Correggio. This composition study is characteristic of Correggio's quick sketching technique of the early to mid 1520s, which, despite the summary execution of the outlines in rather jagged strokes, is replete with suggestive pictorial and coloristic effects. The drawing served as an essentially final but small-scale modello for one of the recurring motifs in the partially monochrome frescoed frieze decorating the nave of the monumental Benedictine abbey church of S. Giovanni Evangelista in Parma, Italy.

The writer provides evidence of the dating and original location of Antonio del Ceraiuolo's panel depicting Christ on the road to Calvary, which was completed for the high altar of the church of the convent of la Crocetta in Florence. She also provides a note on Benedetta, a nun at La Crocetta and a niece of of Lorenzo di Credi, who taught del Ceraiuolo.

IT has long been established that Blake's designs are full of borrowings from earlier art and that traces can be found in particular of the influence of the Italian renaissance and classical antiquity. In his extensive and unveiled use of such sources Blake is at one with contemporary historypainters like James Barry and Henry Fuseli, whom Blake saw as fellow-martyrs in the struggle against the domination of Reynolds. Yet it is equally clear that he had hopes of reaching an audience beyond those with the cultural background to understand the Elevated Style. Reynolds had conceived of history-painting as restricted to the classically educated, to whom 'the great events of Greek and Roman fable and history ... [were by] early education and the usual course of reading, . .. made familiar and interesting'. Blake on the other hand persistently claimed that all men could find the path to redemption through his art and was 'happy to find a Great Majority of Fellow Mortals wh...

The discovery of a unique room, made of marble, destined for Badminton House. If it had been constructed, it would have been one of the most important grand tour interiors in England. Paper published in the 'Burlington' magazine, January 1996.

The broad outlines of Mengs's activities as court painter to Charles III of Spain are well known.' Summoned to Madrid in 1761, when he was at the zenith of his immense European fame, he remained - despite absences in Italy - in the Spanish royal service, producing portraits, history-paintings and frescoes as well as training a whole school of Neo-classical artists, up to his early death at Rome in 1779. Not the least important of his undertakings in Madrid was the decoration in fresco of a series of ceilings in the state rooms of the Palacio Real, which also came to house a considerable quantity of his oil-paintings. A hitherto unnoticed bozzetto and a sub- stantial unstudied manuscript now shed fresh light on his activities in the palace, on the way in which his works were regarded at court, and on several of his more important paintings.

N O one who has passed through those rooms in the Antwerp Gallery which contain the works of the generation before Rubens can fail to have been impressed by a group of vivid and often gruesomely depicted martyrdoms. They are, notably (and for the time being I give the current Gallery attributions) : The Marbrdom of Saints Crispin and Crispinian, by Hieronymus Francken (Fig.2 ;centre panel of an altar-piece), The ChariQ and Marordam of Saints Cosmas and Damian (Fig.3; wings of an altar-piece) ,Diocletiancondemns St Sebastian to Death and St Sebastian beaten with Rods (Figs.8 and 9; reverse of the wings of an altar-piece), and Two Scenes from the Ilfartyrdom of St George (Fig. 10; wings of an altar-piece), all by Ambrosius Francken. As far as I know, the taste for martyrdoms in Antwerp at the closing of the sixteenth century has not yet been specifically discussed nor has the context in which they were produced received much attention. These are the matters I wish to deal with here, p...

The article discusses documents related to the paintings "Jacob's dream," by 16th-17th-century painter Lodovico Cardo (known as Cigoli) and "St. John the Baptist," by Giovanni Baglione, both commissioned by Cardinal Alessandro Montalto. The author discusses Montalto's role as an art patron in early 17th-century Rome, Italy and describes other versions of Vigoli's painting. The author focuses on Giovanni Battista Cardi's biography of Cigoli and the circumstances of the painting's commission.

The writer speculates about a rectangular gold snuffbox mentioned as having been lost by Francisco de Goya in the “Lost property” section of the June 17, 1793, edition of Diario de Madrid. It appears likely that six paintings by David Teniers referenced in the advertisement were part of the decoration of the snuffbox. It is possible that the item lost by Goya was an elaborate French snuffbox, possibly a gift from Charles IV, the King of Spain, his wife, Maria Luisa, or both of them. Goya had been commissioned to paint the first official portraits of Charles IV and Maria Luisa following their coronation.

... My thanks to Simon Fenwick, archivist of the Royal Water-colour Society, for helping me confirm ... early career as well as significant to the medieval revival in British paint ing ... stylistic analysis, finding an interesting theological dimension in both the style and subject of The girlhood ...

... 1899 Mary Berenson recorded in her diary that she, accompanied by Roger Fry and his wife,Helen Coombe, had visited the Sienese forger Federico Joni. In the course of their excursion, Fry commented that the National Gallery had recently acquired a fake Perugino, at which ...

An analysis of Enfant malade (1893–95), a wax sculpture by Medardo Rosso that was recently acquired by the Museo Reina Sofia in Madrid for its permanent collection. Cast from a mold, the piece is one of many Enfants malades that Rosso made over the course of 35 years. However, it is also a unique work of art, with Rosso distinguishing it from the others by displaying unusual casting accidents and chance effects that occurred during its creation, thereby overturning 19th-century norms of casting. The piece is also interesting as a “multiple” on account of the way it escapes classification according to the traditional methods of 19th-century serial sculpture. A final point of interest is the way it commemorates the relationship between Rosso and Louis Vauxcelles—the French critic in whose collection the piece originally resided—as well as Rosso's connection to French critics in a more general sense during his Parisian sojourn from 1889 to circa 1914.

THE scene of Christ in Majesty on the Day ofJudgment which hangs on the wall behind the woman holding a balance in Vermeer's painting in the National Gallery of Art, Washington (Fig.22) has long been regarded as the key to the significance of this work. Most commentators ...