By using this website you agree to our Cookie policy

December 2013

Vol. 155 | No. 1329

Editorial

Home is where the art is

Houses once occupied by distinguished residents are a special strand of the heritage industry that increasingly dominates a nation in thrall to all aspects of the past. We are constantly being exhorted to save and preserve this or that – a factory, a view, a manor house, a pier, a site of outstanding natural beauty, the historic habitat of wildlife, or, indeed, of the famous dead. Some of the shrines we visit are more larded with authenticity than others. Inevitably, the further back in time the illustrious lives were lived, the fewer objects there are likely to be which were familiar to the inhabitants. Was this her chair; was this really his easel? The aspic of preservation continually wobbles between the authentic and the fake.

Editorial read more
Free review

Iconoclasm

There seems little rhyme or reason to Art Under Attack: Histories of British Iconoclasm, the sadly disjointed and confusing exhibition at Tate Britain (to 5th January). Its five overlapping sections are welded together by the curatorial insistence outlined in the Introduction to the accompanying catalogue that the notion of iconoclasm may be applied to any change to the appearance and hence the meaning of images; and furthermore that deliberate damage to works of art may also be considered ‘subversive and playful’ and ‘exploratory and inquisitive in nature’. The show begins with a wide selection of variously gouged, scraped and hammered objects, which were mutilated by sixteenth-century fanatics in accordance with their genuinely iconoclastic hatred of supposed ‘superstition’.

Free review read more
  • MA.DEC.CAVAZZINI.Fig

    Nicolas Poussin, Cassiano dal Pozzo and the Roman art market in the 1620s

    By Patrizia Cavazzini

    Nicolas Poussin’s patrons and his early career in Rome.

  • MA.DEC.Bailey.Fig

    The Rococo altarpiece of St Ignatius: Chile’s grandest colonial retable rediscovered

    By Gauvin Alexander Bailey,Fernando Guzmán

    An examination of the Rococo altarpiece of St Ignatius in Santiago, Chile, and of the European influences on this great retablo.

  • MA.DEC.Finocchio.Fig

    ‘Frick buys a freak’: Dagnan-Bouveret and the development of the Frick Collection

    By Ross Finocchio

    The development of The Frick Collection, including unpublished material on Henry Clay Frick’s early taste for the religious and mystical paintings of Pascal-Adolphe-Jean Dagnan-Bouveret.

  • MA.DEC.Wright.Fig

    A new book on Signorelli

    By Alison Wright

    A review of Tom Henry’s recent book The Life and Art of Luca Signorelli.

  • MA.DEC.PULLINS.Fig

    Dating and attributing the earliest portrait of Benjamin Franklin

    By David Pullins

    A re-evaluation of a painting now found to be the earliest known portrait of Benjamin Franklin, added to an earlier figure of a man by Robert Feke (c.1746–48).

  • MA.DEC.Evansetal.Fig

    A recently discovered oil-sketch by John Constable at the Victoria and Albert Museum

    By Mark Evans,Claire Richardson,Nicola Costaras

    A recently discovered oil-sketch of Hampstead Heath by John Constable at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London (c.1821–22), painted on reverse of another sketch of a similar subject.