Previous Posts: May 2012

So accomplished is the presentation here of our inner biology, it’s easy to overlook the fact that Leonardo isn’t just progressing anatomical understanding. He is also inventing biological drawing. Today, we live in a world of plentiful biological illustration, and all these methods of explaining the inner body are familiar to us: the section, the inner close-up, the view across the cut, the map of the arteries, the exploded joint. In Leonardo’s time, they all needed to be invented. Here he is, turning abstract knowledge into a tangible and understand­able visual coding.

The final room is dizzyingly impressive. It records his most sustained effort to turn his ­anatomical knowledge into a published treatise. Somehow, he gets to know the professor of anatomy at the university in Pavia, and the two of them embark on a thorough investigation of the skeleton and its muscles. A few of the sheets of intense, insightful drawings that result — a set of views of the inner workings of the human hand; a series of cross sections of the human shoulder in motion; the first accurate drawing of the human spine — are downright miraculous.

These sensitively shadowed drawings of body parts achieve so much more than is demanded of them. There’s a sense of movement, a thoroughly con­­vincing corporeality and, above all, that uniquely Leonardoesque sense that you are somehow able to look through the human skin to a precisely observed inner reality: not an abstracted diagram of the stuff of life, but the stuff itself.

The unobservable is being ob­served here. And this utterly ­convin­cing sense of reality is ­Leonardo the artist’s greatest gift to ­Leonardo the scientist.

The forged works imitated a range of artists including Francis Newton Souza, Sayed Haider Raza, Jilali Gharbaoui, Sadanand Bakre, Maqbool Fida Husain, Welsh landscape painter Kyffin Williams, and English surrealist and modernist artist John Tunnard.

It is believed the paintings have been released onto the UK market over a five-year period.

Operation Sketch – led by the Metropolitan Police Art and Antiques Unit, supported by ArtBeat Special Constables – identified the scam in April 2009 after they were contacted by a major London auction house which had identified an unusually high number of Husain paintings offered for sale.

Hundreds of paintings and false instruments were found in the back bedroom and garage of Mumford's home address in East Preston, West Sussex, including gallery stamps, ink pads and Victorian paper used to create a false provenance.

You ask about art prices: 'If anyone knows whether these enormous prices are a) signs of a healthy economy, or b) the world going mad, please let me know.'

To be fair, has the same question not been asked many times in the past, over many years if not several centuries?  On the other hand, I personally cannot think that some of this art will last; and I include even 'The Scream', I am afraid.  Yet on the third hand (maybe this makes me an alien), was that not said also in the past, for instance about Manet and Monet?

You asked the question "Is Rothko really contemporary anymore?", and I'd like to take up this question. It seems to me that recently (say in the last 5 years) the term 'contemporary art' has come to mean not a temporal classification of art made recently (however you define recent), but to mean 'art that is about now'. Contemporary art is art which does not look forward to the future, as modernism did, or root itself in the past (though some allusion is often unavoidable) but concerns itself with our rapidly changing world. I would still agree that a Rothko is more modern than contemporary, but I do think that a reexamination of the term 'contemporary' is necessary in today's art vocabulary.

This work is an important addition to the National Gallery’s British collection. The Gallery currently holds examples of formal and full-length works by Lawrence – John Julius Angerstein, aged about 55, about 1790; John Julius Angerstein, aged over 80, 1824; and Queen Charlotte, 1789 – but this painting exemplifies Lawrence’s influential but more informal depiction of children and families. 

Its inclusion in the collection will enable Gallery visitors to appreciate the breadth of Lawrence’s repertoire. The oval portrait depicts the 16-year-old sitter in motion, her head turned towards the viewer in a pose that has a long tradition in the history of portraiture. However, Lawrence brings a freshness to the work, reflected in the informality and economy of his brushwork.

The Hon. Emily Lamb went on to become an influential, politically prominent society hostess. She first married Peter Leopold Clavering-Cowper, 5th Earl Cowper. After his death, in 1839 she married Henry John Temple, 3rd Viscount Palmerston, who served twice as Prime Minister between 1855 and 1858 and again from 1859 to 1865. Her brother, Viscount Melbourne, also served as Prime Minister.

As an art dealer, I was both taken aback and delighted to receive an invitation to my 4 year old daughter's first group exhibition at her school in Chiswick as part of the Jubilee Celebrations. Face Britain, invites the nation's school children to paint self-portraits, which I believe have been beamed on to the Houses of Parliament.

Here is Isabella (artist and dealer) with her Self-portrait aged 4 ...asking price £8. (Sold).

The tension between the ethereal constellation of stars and the layers of charcoal that lie on the surface like an undulating blanket of dark, engulfs light even as it draws attention to the flat paper on which the scene is rendered. Celmins' shower of stars is transcendental at the same time as it is material. The vast nebulous night sky becomes accessible through the world of drawing. The translation of a vast nebula into a drawn image pressures both, as the artist reconfigures in charcoal on paper the technologically transmitted vision of space.

Untitled #8 encourages deep reflection and suggests a viewing experience of infinite variety, much like the sky Celmins captures in the drawn image. The attention to detail in the artist's process creates an effect as deep in time as the cosmos, yet her hand drawn starscape both encourages and resists such depth by virtue of a few strokes of an eraser. Through sensuous tactility and a keen sense of mimesis, Untitled #8 draws the viewer in and in so doing conflates not only the near and far, the hand-wrought and mechanical, but also the profane and sublime.

Mimesis is widely written about in Western art history - a description of a type of art attempting to mimic reality - which some argue can be traced back to the famous myth of Hellenic painter Zeuxis - whose tale is echoed in Alberti's De Pictura and even in Raphael's own letters (namely the cobbling together of several ideals portions to create a complete ideal).

Software developed to recognise terrorist faces is being adapted to solve the mystery of portraits of unidentified people.

In certain cases, cutting-edge "face recognition" technology could identify faces from digital images, detecting similarities in facial constructs. The data will come from scans of known features of individuals, such as in a death mask or identified sculpture.

A feasibility study is being conducted by two art historians and an electronic engineer at the University of California. They describe FACES (Faces, Art and Computerised Evaluation Systems) as a "new tool for art historians". The project has received a $25,000 government grant.

Conrad Rudolph, professor of art history at the university, said: "Before the advent of photography, portraits were, almost by definition, depictions of people who were important in their own worlds. But, as a walk through almost any major museum will show, a large number of these unidentified portraits from before the 19th century have lost the identities of their subjects."

Frans Hals' The Laughing Cavalier, the 1624 masterpiece in the Wallace Collection, London, is among famous portraits whose sitters remain unknown. The picture's title was coined in the 19th century. Jeremy Warren, the Wallace's director of collections, said: "With the Laughing Cavalier, everyone accepts that name, but actually he's not laughing and he's not a cavalier ... I'd love to know who he is. If this technology can help us do it, we'd be absolutely delighted."

Bendor Grosvenor, a specialist in portraits at the Philip Mould Gallery, London, would particularly like to identify a "rather beautiful portrait" by an anonymous 17th-century hand – currently on show at the National Portrait Gallery.

He said: "It was traditionally called The Duke of Monmouth on his Deathbed, but it isn't him as the dates don't work. Deathbed portraits are relatively rare, so who was important enough, or loved enough, to have been painted in such a moving portrayal by a good artist? I would love to know."

But he added: "Most unknown sitters are unknown because they were only painted once, and there is no other likeness with which to compare them. So the new programme will most likely only help with portraits of people for whom we already have other portraits."

Professor Rudolph accepts that "difficulties are inherent" through variations in expressions, age, angle of pose and lighting. But initial tests – on identified 15th-century portraits of Lorenzo de' Medici, the Florentine ruler – have shown how faces can be reduced to labelled graphs and matched up.

Regarding that deathbed portrait, whoever the man was there does seem something slightly ominous about his hidden neck. Was he, perhaps, someone who had his head cut off and later sewn back on again? Is that why it was thought to have been the Duke of Monmouth? [...] it seems to me that after death one wouldn't need to be wrapped up against the cold anymore, at any rate.

Thinking about your excellent comment on the quondam Duke of Monmouth NPG, I looked up beheaded persons, of whom they are happily very few. I wondered about Sir Henry Vane the Younger and Colonel Penruddock, who both seem vaguely similar in face and age and date of death. The tight lips drawn up lips of the NPG sitter intrigued me, so I began to google 'postmortem effects of decapitation' but then I remembered that's the sort of thing loonies look up.

The grant was made through the new fast-track procedure introduced by the Heritage Lottery Fund last year to help national collections raise purchase funds quickly. Chief executive Carole Souter called it an extraordinary painting, "luminous, beautiful, a real masterclass in brush stroke technique".

The Art Fund charity has already given £750,000, and individuals and friends of the museum – one of the oldest public museums in the world and now the most visited in the UK outside London – have given a further £200,000.