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.
Although it has sometimes seemed that Judgment Day would come sooner than the completion of the new British Library building at St Pancras, the date currently given for the Libraryns removal from the British Museum is the end of 1996. No-one can view the prospect of its departure without regret. This is not simply a question of sentimental attachment to Panizzi's round reading room. More profoundly, the Museum's and the Library's histories have been so intimately interwoven that the physical sundering of their collections will be intellectually painful - particularly for the Depart- ment of Prints and Drawings, whose holdings were arbitrarily distinguished from those of the Library at an early stage.
As Anthony Blunt once complained, people frequently write about Poussin's Bacchanals 'as if it was the most normal thing in the world for a painter to choose such themes in the 1630s, but the fact is that there were remarkably few precedents for this practice, and hardly any in the immediately preceding decades'.l The most important precedents were Titian's Aldobrandini Bacchanals, and Annibale Carracci's Triumph of Bacchus and Ariadne in the centre of the Farnese ceiling. But the iconography of Poussin's Bacchanals differs from that of Titian and Annibale in several respects: unlike the loosely related group of paintings for Alfonso d'Este to which Titian contributed, Poussin's series concentrates on Bacchus and his companions, Pan and Silenus; Ariadne, the companion of Bacchus in Annibale's Triumph and the joint subject of Titian's Bacchus and Ariadne, is absent from the series, although Hercules, a more surprising participant, appears in Poussin's Triumph of Bacchus (Fig.3). These peculiarities may partially be explained by the fact that Poussin's painting emerged from studies for an Indian friumph of Bacchus.2 But Bacchus's Indian triumph is itself an unusual theme, and we are left with a singularly puzzling group of pictures: a series of Bacchanals comprising a Triumph of BacchusTriumph of Pan (Fig.7) and complemented by a Triumph of Silenus (Fig.9), plus, perhaps associated with this group, a Triumph of Neptune and Amphitrate (Fig.8).
which is paired with a
Since it first came to light, there has been much discussion of the Adoration of the Golden Calf (Fig.ll) now in the M.H. De Young Memorial Museum, San Francisco,l though this has centred exclusively on its date and authorship. When discovered and published in 1919 by J.H. Johnstone,2 the painting bore a signature and a date which has been interpreted in different ways; in 1957 the last digit became scarcely legible as a result of a somewhat harsh cleaning.3 Some scholars have deciphered the date) following Johnstone's reading, as 1629,4 while others, following Martin Davies and Denis Mahon, read it as 1626.5
