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November 1983

Vol. 125 | No. 968

The Burlington Magazine

Editorial

The Rembrandt Research Project

A VOCAL trend in art history today concerns itself more with the social history than with Stilkritik and connoisseurship. Yet even the most fervant practitioner of this 'new art history' will surely welcome the appearance of the first part of a modern catalogue of a major artist, in this instance the paintings of Rembrandt. Those still committed to the old fashioned discipline, when presented with the results of such intensive research, will require no such apologia. While addressing itself principally to the Rembrandtistes, the new publication raises a number of issues of wider interest to do with methods of connoisseurship in general, and in particular the writing of a catalogue raisonne.

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  • Front Matter

  • Jan Lievens in Leiden and London

    By Christopher Brown

    IN 1783 Thomas Pennant published The Journey from Chester to London in the belief that 'the ground which is described in the following sheets, has been for some centuries passed over by the incurious Traveller; and has had the hard fortune of being constantly execrated for its dullness'. In the course of his journey, Pennant stopped at Combe Abbey, near Coventry, the seat of 'a jovial English baron', Lord Craven. Looking at the paintings hanging in the house, Pennant singled out for praise full-length portraits of the Winter King and Queen, Frederik V Elector Palatine and his wife, Elizabeth, the daughter of James I. The full-length of the Winter Queen was presumably the portrait of her by Honthorst, painted in 1642, now in the national Portrait Gallery (on loan from the National Gallery). 'The young Craven', he noted, 'was among her warmest devotees, and continued the attachment to the last moment of her life; possessed her deserved confidence, directed all her affairs, and gave a most distinguishing proof of his esteem by building for her use, at his estate in Berkshire, a magnificent palace'. Pennant went on to admire the collection of 'portraits of men of eminence in Germany [which] were brought over by the Queen of Bohemia, and by her bequeathed by will to Lord Craven'. The last two painting which caught Pennant's eye at Combe were: 'Two fine paintings by Rembrandt, of two philosophers; each with a noble pupil: one in Turkish dress; the other in an ermine rove. These young figures are called Prince Rupert and Price Maurice. The time of the residence of their mother [the Winter Queen] in Holland, agrees entirely with that of Rembrandt in Amsterdam, which makes the conjecture probable'.

  • An Unknown Portrait Bust by Giuliano Finelli at Canepina

    By Minna Heimbürger

    AT Canepina, a fascinating village amidst a grove of old chestnut trees in an out-of-the-way corner of the Monti Cimini, south of Viterbo, lurks a distinguished seventeenth-century portrait bust carved in white marble (Figs.17-19). Conserved in the church of the Madonna del Carmine, according to the inscription under its niche, it represents Angelo Menicucci, the Carmelite monk who had embellished the church and erected the monastery at the beginning of the seventeenth century.

  • Kenneth Clark (1903-1983)

    By F. J. B. Watson
  • Back Matter