Burlington Contemporary is the Burlington Magazine’s free online platform for reviews and research on international contemporary art.
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Burlington Contemporary is the Burlington Magazine’s free online platform for reviews and research on international contemporary art.
THE thirteenth-centuary paintings of the St Francis legend in the nave of the Lower Church of S. Francis at Assisi have always been overshadowed by the much better known and more extensive St Francis cycle in the Upper Church nave. The poor condition of the Lower Church cycle helps explain this neglect.
THE Maestro di San Francesco was a trail-blazer in central Italian painting of the thirteenth century. One of his most influential works was a double-sided altar-piece, which was reconstructed by Garrison and Schultze. The purpose of this article is to make some minor revisions to their reconstructions, and then to consider the provenance of the altar-piece, as well as the sources for its revoloutionary design and iconography.
Edward Garrison died in hospital in London on 16th October 1981. In recent years he had struggled with indomitably against recurrent ill health and his scholarly activity continued until the last months of his life. He was born in Chicago in 1900, and entered art histroy relatively late in life after a succcessful buisness career. His M.A thesis (1945) written under the direction of Professor Richard Offner at tthe Institute of Fine Arts in New York had the prophetic title Elements of Shape as Elements of Date in Florentine Painted Panels.
.ONE of the bibliographies provided for students of medieval history at the University of London contains a marginal annotation marking books as 'physically unwieldy', a pertinent warning to the innoccent would-be borrower of such tomes as Cresswell's survey of Islamic art or Kubach's monograph on Speyer Cathedral The Plan of St Gall falls into this category. A magnum opus of a thousand pages weighing over twenty pounds and representing twenty years work, it covers many more areas of erudition than lie within this reviewer's competence.
of a thousand pages weighing over twenty pounds and representing twenty years work, it covers many more areas of erudition than lie within this reviewer's competence.Until ten years ago, it would have been fair to say that the sculpture on the west facade of Auxerre Cathedral had been insufficiently studied: this is no longer the case. A provocative book by Folke Nordstrom on the classicising style of the socle reliefs appeared in 19744, and was followed by two articles on the iconography of some of the same reliefs. Together with the book under review, these recent contributions have given us a reasonable foundation from which to assess the importance of the earliest sculptural programme at Auxerre, but the most important issue, the question of dating, remains problematic.
The second edition of Eve Borsook's classic study is described on its title page as revised and enlarged. Both claimes are understatements: the introductory chapter has almost doubled in length, the catalogue of monuments more than tripled, and there are one hundred and fifty-six plates instead of the ninety-one of the original edition.
Orgelprospekt is a term for which there is no equivalent in English - no doubt because in this country we have a genius for placing organs to block rather than to frame a view.
is a term for which there is no equivalent in English - no doubt because in this country we have a genius for placing organs to block rather than to frame a view.Dr Dhanens is certainly the leading authority on the Van Eycks, and her book, which has been some years in preparation, has been anxiously awaited. Intended for specialists and for general readers, it is splendidly produced, and must take its place immediately as the standard work on the artists. Though a vast amount has been written about the Van Eycks, Weasle's book of 1908 has remained the essential work of reference.
The fifth volume of Sir Ernst's collected essays contains eleven pieces published between 1961 and 1976, not always in the most accessibly places. There are lectures in the main, and the lecturer's voice is clearly audible even in the frozen words of the printed text. All the ingredients of a classic Gombrich lecture are here - I would say 'Vintage Gombrich' if he were not teetotal - the lucidity, the elegance, the Viennese anecdotes, the references to the New Yorker, the analogies with the world of animals or insects, the grumbles about contemporary culture and society.
the analogies with the world of animals or insects, the grumbles about contemporary culture and society.'Bank books' have become such a fixture of Italian art scholarship, that we nearly forget how odd it once seemed that finacial institutions should have taken to publishing works of art history. Yet, without the sponsorship of the local Banca Commerciale or Cassa di Risparmio, the native geniuses and architectural monuments of countless Italian towns would have been deprived of their monographs. About all that the bank books of today have in common with their coffee-tabe ancestors are their lavish production - plentiful colour plates are the rule - and their distressing rarity. Unless a commercial press undertakes a reprinting, the editions are usually limited and the distribution kept fuori commercio.
Western historians have always been fascinated by the Edo period, when the rulers of Japan, fearful of the enroachment by the European powers, closed their doors to the world and withdrew into national seclusion for more than two hundred years from 1639 until after the middle of the nineteenth century, when the American Commodore Perry, forcing the re-opening of the country to foreign trade, found preserved in all essentials a society which the European scientific revolution of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had passed by.
