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.
It is rare to be able to report a completely successful conclusion to a campaign supported in this Magazine's pages. But such a battle was won last month with the Chancellor of the Exchequer's announcement in the Budget of a change in tax legislation to enable national museums in Britain which do not charge for admission to reclaim Value Added Tax (VAT) on all their operations. As we have often pointed out (most recently in the Editorial in the July 2000 issue), VAT has been one of the major stumbling blocks (if not the only one) in the way of persuading museums to drop charges that they currently levy, and the anomalous tax rules have meant that those who have maintained free access in line with declared government policy have been penalised for so doing. Congratulations are therefore in order to the Secretary of State for Culture, who has always supported this change, but above all to Sir Denis Mahon, the National Art Collections Fund and the Charity Tax Reform Group who devised the solution that has essentially been adopted. It is a most remarkable example of what can be achieved by intelligent drafting and tireless lobbying. It would be very desirable if a solution could next be found to the much more complex problem of exempting university museums from the burden of VAT.
Already in the preface to his Entretiens (1666), Andre Felibien made clear the pre-eminent place that should be accorded to Nicolas Poussin, the 'gloire de notre nation':
J'aurai . . . cet avantage de parler avec eloge d'un peintre francais qui a ete l'honneur & la gloire de notre nation, & qu'on peut dire avoir enleve toute la science de la Peinture comme d'entre les bras de la Grece & de l'Italie pour l'apporter en France, ou les plus hautes sciences & les plus beaux arts semblent s'etre aujourd'hui retires.'
In 1994 the Art Institute of Chicago acquired a splendid painting attributed to Greuze entitled A lady reading the letters of Heloise and Abilard (Figs.8 and 9), which was published by Martha Wolff in this Magazine two years later.' There the matter might have ended, but for the exhibition Intimate Encounters: Love and Domesticity in Eighteenth-Century France, organised by Richard Rand, which brought together a fine group of masterpieces by Greuze.' For the first of the two authors of this article, the attribution of the Chicago painting to Greuze had always been problematic; after seeing the work at the Toledo venue of Rand's exhibition, he was convinced that it was indefensible on stylistic grounds.3 The second author, previously untroubled by the attribution to Greuze but alerted to his colleague's doubts, made the following discovery concerning its authorship almost by accident.
I have been intrigued for some time by the resemblance between David's Horatii (Fig.21) and the Roman copies in Naples of the early fifth-century B.C. statues of the two Athenian tyrannicides Harmodios and Aristogeiton (Figs. 22-24). It is now possible to suggest a connexion through which David may have used the Aristogeiton as a source for his oath-taking triplets, and the Harmodios and another Roman copy, probably of a triumphant Perseus (Fig.25) as a model for their rejoicing father. The missing link is these statues' conversion in the late sixteenth century into a group of the Horatii and Curiatii.
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