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.
We should perhaps not be surprised that it has taken the power of television to alert the British government to the plight of its regional museums. Mention of the problem by Sir Nicholas Serota in his Richard Dimbleby lecture broadcast on 22nd November resulted in a hasty announcement that the Secretary of State for Culture would be appointing an advisory group or task force (its members yet to be named) to report to him (at a date to be defined) with a 'national strategical framework for regional collections'. Although we may question this improvised policy making, the initiative itself must be enthusiastically welcomed. It has long been clear that a more holistic approach needs to be taken to the recurrent crises that afflict regional museums, and there is at least a residual hope that a report directly commissioned by a minister will not be entirely ignored.
The Search for original surtace coatings plays a vital role in the study and understanding not only of how paintings were made, but also, and more importantly, of how they appeared. Although many late nineteenth- and twentieth-century varnishing materials have been well documented (and are often found to remain on the surfaces of pictures), it is exceedingly rare to be able to identify an original surface remaining on an old-master painting. There are useful written sources describing varnish recipes, materials and application techniques (the most familiar of these being, of course, Cennino Cennini's Libro dell'arte),l but it is often difficult to discover direct links between such textual references and what actually remains on the surfaces. Although this is primarily because most original surfaces on older paintings have been lost during past cleanings, it is also a consequence of the fact that much of the complex scientific technology required for this type of identification has been developed only very recently.
Three contracts, recently discovered in the Archivio della Pia Casa dei Catecumeni e Neofiti in Rome,l shed light on the patronage and decoration of the chapel of St Charles Borromeo, the first chapel on the right of the church of the Madonna dei Monti (Figs.12 and 13). Established through a bequest to the Madonna dei Monti by Andrea Baceini, who died on 1 3th October 1614, the chapel was decorated in 1621-22 under the direction of the Arciconfraternita di S. Giuseppe dei Catecumeni e Neofiti, a confraternity affiliated with the church which supervised the institutions in Rome concerned with the care and religious education of newly- converted Jews and Muslims.2 The confraternity commissioned two artists to decorate the chapel: Giovanni da San Giovanni (Giovanni Mannozzi), who was responsible for the frescoes depicting the miracles of St Charles Borromeo and other scenes (Figs. 15-20), and Innocenzo Tacconi, who provided the altar-piece of the Madonna and Child appearing to St Charles Borromeo (Figs. 13 and 14). While Giovanni's involve- ment in the chapel decorations has long been known, if little discussed,3 Tacconi's participation is a complete surprise. In the absence of any indication in early guide books as to the altar-piece's attribution, later authors have either presumed that Giovanni da San Giovanni was its author or have left the matter open.4
