Recently uploaded to my employer, The National Gallery’s youtube channel, this is a pleasant throwback to one of the joys of my working life last year: the Raphael exhibition and attendant events, such as this, the annual Linbury lecture, given by the great Patricia Rubin on the enduring afterlife of Raphael’s Madonna della Seggiola, today in the Palazzo Pitti in Florence. Director Gabriele Finaldi introduced Pat, who gave a knockout lecture, and I had the pleasure of discussing Raphael with her afterwards. Check it out here:
Tag Archive for 'The National Gallery'
Lorenzo Lotto, Portrait of a man, probably 1540s, black chalk, 250 x 186 mm. Florence, Gallerie degli Uffizi
As you may remember I was involved in organising an exhibition on the portraits of renaissance artist Lorenzo Lotto back in 2018-19 with my colleagues Miguel Falomír and Enrico Maria Dal Pozzolo. It was shown at the Museo del Prado in Madrid and the National Gallery in London. An international conference was held at the Prado in 2018 and I presented there a paper on Lotto’s drawings. It has now been published by the Prado as part of the conference proceedings.
I’m thrilled to see it in print, even if I’m even less certain of the observations I make in it than I was when I was writing it. Very few sheets from Lotto’s hand survive, even if he must have been a prolific draughtsman — and clearly was a great one — so it is extremely hard to establish a reliable corpus of drawings securely attributable to him. Uncertainty has been a constant in scholarship on the subject and my article is no exception. Still, I hope it will prove useful, if nothing else as a summary of where we are on the subject, and also as a case study in the challenges and usefulness of connoisseurship. Do check it out.
Baldassare Castiglione, 1519
I gave a Facebook Live tour of the last room of the Raphael exhibition at the National Gallery the other night, devoted to the artist’s late portraits. You can see it here. You’re welcome!
It is here! After six years of planning: the great Raphael exhibition that I’ve co-curated with Tom Henry and David Ekserdjian has opened at the National Gallery in London. It presents a comprehensive overview of Raphael’s entire career and charts his creativity across media and art forms, beyond drawing and painting to architecture and to design for tapestry, print, sculpture and the applied arts, as well as his activities as an archaeologist and art theorist. Even his essays in poetry are included. Need I say that the loans we have received from across Europe and the United States are incredible?
Originally planned for 2020, to mark the 500th anniversary of Raphael’s death on 6 April, Good Friday 1520, it was postponed due to the pandemic. I’m relieved that it is finally happening. Raphael feels so urgent today, not least after two years of pandemic and the outbreak of the war in Ukraine and with the sometimes crushing awareness of the challenges posed by climate change and environmental destruction. Raphael’s art and whole ethos is the opposite of that — a passionate assertion of human dignity, community and civilisation. Art doesn’t change the world, of course, but it still reflects it.
Do go, often and repeatedly, if you can. I promise you won’t be disappointed. Book here.
I have a new book out! Several years in the making, The Compass and the Mirror — Sebastiano del Piombo and Michelangelo is an anthology of scholary articles on the two great artists and their collaboration and relationship between 1511 and 1547. Inspired by the exhibition Michelangelo & Sebastiano that I curated at the National Gallery in 2017, it gathers a to my mind stellar group of scholars, conservators and scientists in what I hope will be a standard reference volume for anyone researching the field in the years to come. Published by Brepols, you can find more information, including how to order, on their website. Here is the table of contents: Continue reading ‘New Book out!’
Guido Reni, The Adoration of the Shepherds, about 1640, London, The National Gallery
In The National Gallery’s ongoing offering of online ten-minute talks, I’m chipping in with 6 and half minutes on Giorgio Vasari’s great Allegory of Patience, which we have on loan from The Kletsch Collection. Enjoy!
See more ten-minute talks and other video content from the Gallery here.
I recently had the pleasure of sitting down (online) with Howard Burton of Ideas Roadshow podcast to discuss my life and work, particularly at The National Gallery in London. The resulting podcast is now online! Clocking it at over two hours, it’s rather wide-ranging covering in particularly how my life in comics intersects with that in art and how hip hop changed my life. Check it out here:
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The exhibition of Titian’s six great so-called poesie for King Philip II (c. 1551-1562) that I helped organise at the National Gallery in London, and which showed in modified form at the Prado earlier this year, has now opened at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston under the title Titian: Women, Myth & Power.
From what I’ve seen in the press and online, I’m greatly impressed with their installation and didactic material they’ve put together, and it pleases me greatly to see these great Titians united in my American home away from home in Boston. I can’t wait hopefully to see it later in the autumn.
If you’re anyway near it, do go see it. It is truely and without hyperbole a once-in-a-lifetime chance. These are some of the great paintings of the Western tradition and they haven’t been seen together since the 1570s.
Postponed by Covid, the exhibition La forma del tempo (‘The Shape of Time’) at the Poldi Pezzoli in Milan finally opened last month and runs till 27 September. Centred around the museum’s extraodinary collection of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century clocks, it examines conceptions of time in the renaissance as expressed in the visual arts. The National Gallery has lent Titian’s Allegory of Prudence, a picture that grapples with issues of family, succession, memory and time through a creative interpretation of a traditional iconography that represents time in the form of three heads, either human or animal. Anyway, I wrote the entry for the painting and would encourage readers who are in MIlan or find themselves there to go see the show. It looks fascinating. Check our Works section for info on the catalogue.
One of Lorenzo Lotto’s greatest altarpieces can be found in the small church of Santa Maria della Pietà in the town of Monte San Giusto in the Marche. Painted in 1528-29, it is a stunningly ambitious representation of the Crucifixion, conceived by a master at the height of his powers, but also an artist who was increasingly struggling to find work in his native Venice leading him to seek employment elsewehere, especially in the Marche where many of the greatest of his later works can still be seen today.
In preparation for the twin Lotto exhibitions of 2018-19, Lorenzo Lotto Portraits at the Museo del Prado and the National Gallery and Lorenzo Lotto: Il richiamo delle Marche, Prof. Enrico Maria Dal Pozzolo and I visited Monte San Giusto to see the altarpiece in July 2018. It was a great experience and we susequently agreed to help produce videos on the work for the Commune. These have now been released to the public and will hopefully help attract people to the altarpiece, the town and the region. I cannot recommend it highly enough. For help, check this guide to seeing Lotto in the region.
Continue reading ‘Lorenzo Lotto’s Monte San Giusto Crucifixion’
Titian, The Rape of Europa, 1559-62, Boston, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum
This week, the Museo del Prado in Madrid opened their exhibitions Passiones Mitológicas, or Mythological Passions. The show is their version of the exhibition I helmed at the National Gallery, which gathers for the first time since the sixteenth century Titian’s six mytholgical paintings, so-called poesie, originally painted for the Spanish king Philip II between around 1551 and 1562.
The show at the Prado is a kind of homecoming for these masterworks, a return to the royal Spanish collection to which they belonged and in which they became a cornerstone, influencing generations of artists. The Prado is therefore uniquely positioned to tell a broader story of the development of European painting in the early modern era and Titian’s crucial role in it. They have also taken the opportunity to tell the story of the development of secular, mythological genres of painting in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as kind of liberating format that encouraged experimentation.
Diego Velázquez, Las hilanderas (The Spinners), 1655-60. Madrid, Museo del Prado
It is of course incredibly difficult to travel at the moment, but if you’re in Madrid this exhibition is a rare treat, showing as it does the great poesie with masterworks by Veronese, Velázquez, Poussin, Rubens, Ribera and others. It is on until 4 July, so I for one am hoping for a summer visit! In the meantime, I believe they will be offering a virtual tour.
It seemed to come out of nowhere. Thought lost, Giorgio Vasari’s Allegory of Patience of 1542 popped up on the art market. It was acquired by the Klesch Collection in London where I first went to see it. Greatly impressed with the picture, we expressed an interest in taking it on loan at the National Gallery and the owners kindly agreed: it has been on display at Trafalgar Square since March last year, finding a natural place among the Florentine sixteenth-century pictures and significantly complementing the collection. In my opinion, it’s as good as Vasari gets as an easel painter — a monumental picture with great wall power. This may in part be due to the probable involvement in its design by Michelangelo, but it is in any case a bravura piece of painting.
Now, the Klesch Collection has published a small book on it, authored by the distinguished scholar of Florentine renaissance art Carlo Falciani. He, my colleague at the Gallery Caroline Campbell, and I also contributed to a short film on it. Check it out, and do come see the picture if you’re in London when the Gallery is open again!
Order the book via its publisher, Paul Holberton.
Dosso Dossi, The Adoration of the Kings, about 1527-9, London, The National Gallery
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Michelangelo and Sebastiano on Italian radio!
Sebastiano del Piombo, Study of Martha and other figures for the Raising of Lazarus, 1517. Frankfurt, Städel
Last week I was a guest on the live culture evening broadcast og Italian Radio 3 along with my great colleague and friend Costanza Barbieri to talk about Michelangelo and Sebastiano del Piombo on the occassion of our new(ish) book The Compass and the Mirror. If you can deal with my pessimo italiano, I think it turned out pretty informative, especially due to Costanza’s presence there. And if you just can’t get enough, here’s the video of the book presentation we did at the Accademia San Luca last autumn.