By using this website you agree to our Cookie policy

November 1998

Vol. 140 | No. 1148

French Art

Editorial

The Restoration of Albert

Prince Albert is surely the most memorialised man in London. He has his Hall, his Bridge, his (shared) Museum, his Dock, Gate and Embankment; there are nearly fifty streets and roads named after him; Norman Shaw's pioneering block of de luxe flats carries his name; he stares out, in a medallion portrait, from the Grosvenor Hotel; at Holborn Circus, on horseback, he raises his hat to the City of London; tablets mark his foundation-laying and tape-cutting for innu- merable buildings - from the old county asylum at Friern Barnet to the early public baths in Whitechapel. Beyond this material presence in bricks and mortar, bronze and stone, his progressive and enquiring spirit wafts above South Kensington and presides at the meetings of many a learned society. But the most spectacular commemoration of the Prince Consort, the true public fruit of Queen Victoria's grief, is Sir George Gilbert Scott's Albert Memorial, across Kensington Gore from the Royal Albert Hall.

 

Editorial read more
  • Poussin and Nonnos

    By Malcolm Bull

    Nonnos is thought to have lived in the fifth century A.D. and to have come from Panopolis in Egypt. His two surviving works make a curious pair, being a forty-eight book epic in Greek hexameters about the life of Dionysus, and, in the same metre, a paraphrase of the fourth gospel. Neither poem has enjoyed great renown. The Dionysiaca was unknown in the middle ages, and the manuscript came from Byzantium to Italy only in the fifteenth century. It was first published in 1569, and translated into Latin in 1605. In consequence, although the epic provided a comprehensive account of the life of Bacchus, including many stories not found elsewhere, it had a limited influence on artistic and literary culture in the early modern period and was sparingly used even by mythographers. The exceptions to this general neglect are mostly French. The Greek edition of the Dionysiaca, published in Antwerp in 1569, was almost immediately used as the basis for a complex decorative programme, designed by Jean Dorat and executed by Niccolo dell'Abate and his son, which celebrated the entry of Charles IX and Elizabeth of Austria into Paris in 1571.' It was in France too that the only vernacular translation appeared - Claude Boitet de Frauville's Les Dionysiaques; ou Les metamorphoses, les voyages, les amours, et, les advantures et les conquestes de Bacchus aux Indes, published in Paris in 1625.2 Unlike the Latin translation, this was a relatively accessible work written in straightforward prose without the Greek text or any critical annotation. Insofar as Nonnos ever found a wider audience it was through this edition.

     

  • Who was Pierre Lemaire?

    By Arnauld Brejon de Lavergnée

    Despite the efforts of art historians, Pierre Lemaire remains a mysterious figure. For almost three centuries his identity has been confused with that of the architecture- and ruin-painter Jean Lemaire, both of them known by the sobriquet Lemaire- Poussin, and his personality remains largely unknown. While he has become something of a dumping ground for architectural vedute that cannot be attributed to Jean Lemaire,2 his name has also been attached to at least one celebrated picture in a strongly Poussinesque style, the Golden calf at San Francisco,3 and he has provided a handy identification for the 'assistant' who copied Poussin's drawings at the end of the 1630s.4 The problem of Pierre Lemaire is now becoming almost fashionable, as happened with Charles Mellin some twenty years ago. Maurizio Fagiolo dell'Arco's recent book on Jean Lemaire, the attributions to Pierre put forward by Doris Wild, Anthony Blunt, Gilles Chomer and Sylvain Laveissiere, as well as those in the corpus of Poussin drawings by Pierre Rosenberg and Louis-Antoine Prat, and in Jean- Claude Boyer's review of Fagiolo dell'Arco's book (see p.756 below),5 all invite a closer scrutiny of this truly obscure artist whose only certain works are one painted copy and some engravings. By contrast, Charles Mellin was initially much better known, even before any attempt was made to reconstruct his oeuvre.