Previous Posts: November 2021

Starting from 19 March 2022, the Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi and the Musei del Bargello will be hosting Donatello, The Renaissance. This historic, once-in-a-lifetime exhibition sets out to reconstruct the outstanding career of one of the most important and influential masters of Italian art of any age, juxtaposing his work with masterpieces by other Italian Renaissance masters such as Brunelleschi, Masaccio, Andrea Mantegna, Giovanni Bellini, Raphael and Michelangelo. 

Curated by Francesco Caglioti and devised as a single exhibition in two venues, Palazzo Strozzi and the Museo Nazionale del Bargello, the exhibition is designed to celebrate Donatello in dialogue with institutions of Florence and indeed the whole of Italy, in addition to crucial international cooperation, in an effort to expand the debate on this master both in time and in space, in terms of materials, techniques and genres, in order finally to do justice to the artist’s universal dimension.

The Assistant Curator supports the care, research, display and interpretation of the  Gallery’s collection of designated national importance. The post plays a critical role in achieving the Gallery’s vision: to be an inspirational cultural destination for everybody –  unlocking fresh perspectives through the art of the past and present. 

The Assistant Curator will be someone with a passion for Old Master paintings, who is invested in bringing new ideas to the field. They will be a team-player who is able to  support others, whilst also developing exciting projects of their own. They will thrive in  a varied and hands-on environment, where one day might be spent cleaning frames and the next might be researching in the library for a new display, or creating content  for our social media channels

Egg-tempera painting is a pictorial technique widely used in the Middle Ages, although poorly studied in its physico-chemical aspects until now. Here we show how NMR relaxometry and rheology can be combined to probe egg-tempera paints and shed new light on their structure and behavior. Based on recipes of the 15th century, model formulations with egg yolk and green earth have been reproduced to characterize the physicochemical properties of this paint at the mesoscopic and macroscopic scales. The rheological measurements highlight a synergetic effect between green earth and egg yolk, induced by the interactions between them and the structural organisation of the system. 1H NMR relaxometry emphasizes the presence and the structure of a network formed by the yolk and the pigment.

The exhibition celebrates the fifty years since the acquisition by the Italian State and the seventies since the discovery of the famous painting by Caravaggio Giuditta beheading Holofernes. 

The painting, created in Rome at the beginning of the Seventeenth Century, is kept in Palazzo Barberini. 

A series of masterpieces from all over the world,  including the beautiful Judith and Holofernes by Artemisia Gentileschi,  document the overwhelming novelty triggered by Caravaggio’s work in contemporary painting.

The Star of Bethlehem is the worlds largest watercolour and its been on display at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery for 130 years. Its essential we replace its fragile glazing as well as carefully assessing and conserving the painting. 

The delicate Holy Grail tapestries are at serious risk of weakening and even tearing. They need conservation and a really good clean. We havent been able to display them since 2015 and they are currently in storage. 

These monumental artworks have an important place in the history of British art as well as being stars of Birminghams collection. This vital fundraising campaign will ensure that they can be enjoyed by you  and thousands of other visitors  for many years to come.

This is a wonderful overview of the remarkable range of dog portraits—there are no human sitters—produced over the last 250 years. It features well-known works such as Rosa Bonheur’s Brizo, (one of the best-loved portraits in The Wallace Collection), George Stubbs’ Turk, Thomas Gainsborough’s portrait of his two dogs Tristram and Fox, Lucian Freud’s oil painting of Pluto, his pet whippet, and David Hockney’s dachshunds Stanley and Boodgie. 

Over 50 works, arranged by theme, are drawn from major British collections, including the Royal Collection, the V & A, Tate Britain, the British Museum, and a wealth of regional museums and private collections. In addition there are memorabilia and souvenirs, including bronzes, photos, brooches, Fabergé works, and even stuffed dogs, many relating to the British royals, especially Queen Victoria and her children.

We used to live 20 minutes from each other in Berkshire, so for Christmas I bought him a pop-up fridge from Harrods. You pressed a button and there’d be steam and lights and a bottle of champagne. It cost me £600; a lot of money in the 70s. We swapped presents and he said: “Oh very nice, dear, thank you.” He gave me a Rembrandt painting! I’ve never felt so stingy.

This biographical dictionary of engravers working on copper encompasses both those who produced fine art prints, and also those who engraved book illustrations for medical, technical and literary works, all of which played a more important part than is usually realised in spreading information in the age of Enlightenment. Some 4,000 biographical entries draw on much unpublished information, researched over four decades, notably records of apprenticeship, genealogy, insurance and bankruptcy as well as newspaper advertisements and contemporary accounts.

This disturbing portrait by Santerre is designed to impress by showing the sitter’s wealth and position in society. It shows a young boy, who is an enslaved African person, brought from a plantation to work as an unpaid house servant. He is wearing a decorative metal slave collar around his neck. His name is not known, but the sitter is Catherine-Marie Legendre (or Le Gendre, died 1749), the wife of French nobleman, Claude Pecoil (1629-1722), Marquise de Septème.  

The painting will be displayed with a label which asks: “Does this portrait belong on the walls of the gallery today? Does its display help us tell and understand the history of slavery? Or does it continue to honour someone who benefitted from the slave trade? In light of recent international events, we want to know what our visitors think. We are displaying the portrait to be transparent with visitors and begin this conversation.

The ‘Creating Constable’ exhibition, explores the work of one of Suffolk’s most famous artists – John Constable and opens at Christchurch Mansion’s Wolsey Art Gallery from 27 November 2021 to 24 April 2022.  The exhibition coincides with the 200th anniversary of The Hay Wain, one of Constable’s most famous works. It is also 200 years since the death of Suffolk artist George Frost, who was Constable’s early mentor.

To mark this significant bicentenary, the ‘Creating Constable’ exhibition explores Constable’s artistic roots, revealing stories about Suffolk artists, family, friends, and early supporters who provided him with the foundations on which his career was built. 

Four early Constable works recently acquired by Ipswich Museums, with support from the Friends of the Ipswich Museums, the Art Fund, and the V&A Purchase Fund, will also be on public display for the first time. The recently discovered artworks were found in a scrapbook compiled by Constable’s relations, the Masons in Colchester, and include a portrait of his brother Abram and early landscapes.

The J. Paul Getty Museum seeks a Curator of Decorative Arts with expertise in French Decorative Arts of the 17th and 18th centuries. This position within the Department of Sculpture and Decorative Arts will play a key role in a proposed redisplay and reinterpretation of the Museum's world-renown collection of French Decorative Arts. The successful candidate will have a track-record of curating engaging and meaningful exhibitions and displays of decorative arts and sculpture; the broad art historical background to bring context and insight to the interpretive program; and the ability and willingness to develop compelling and inclusive narratives for diverse audiences. Reporting to the Senior Curator of Sculpture and Decorative Arts, the Curator of Decorative Arts will be a team player, working closely with other curators in the Department, as well as with colleagues from Conservation, Design, Exhibition, Education, Interpretive Content, Registrars, Imaging Services and Preparators. They will also oversee for all the curatorial duties related to the collection and exhibitions.

Something unique, indeed in some ways incredible, took place in the mid-16th century in Vicenza. Among the most dynamic areas in Europe for the production and trading of silk, the city, thanks to its increasing wealth, took a gamble on the transformation of its image from a “provincial location”, through avant-garde art and architecture, into a true capital of culture. Cultured and cosmopolitan clients, Vicenza’s nobility believed in the visions of a group of talented, ambitious young artists, who would become famous all over the world. What bound them together was their passion for new art nourished by that of Antiquity, born in the Rome of Michelangelo and Raphael, the art that Vasari was to define as the “modern manner”. It was very clear to the young artists that the resounding strength of this new language would enable them to challenge and undermine the venerated and celebrated masters and their traditional models, which were dominant in Venice at the time. 

It was the genius of the architecture of Andrea Palladio, of the painters Paolo Veronese and Jacopo Bassano and the great sculptor Alessandro Vittoria. 

It is from these premises that this unique exhibition takes its cue, which, by interweaving absolute masterpieces of painting, sculpture and architecture, combined with books, fabrics, precious objects and tapestries, will transport visitors back in time, inside the amazing “factory” of the Renaissance, telling of thirty years of the exceptional artistic life of Vicenza, from 1550 to the inauguration of the Olympic Theatre in 1585.