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.
IN RECENT MONTHS considerable discussion has arisen over the role of memorials and commemorative statues in London. This has been generated by the proposal to place a statue of Nelson Mandela in Trafalgar Square; the plan to commemorate Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, at Carlton House Terrace; reactions to recent memorials erected in Whitehall and Park Lane; and, as background, by the continuing indecision as to how best to occupy the long-empty fourth plinth at the north-east corner of Trafalgar Square. For most of the time people seem perfectly indifferent to the bronze and stone population with whom they share the city’s streets and squares. But any new addition to the family – whether at planning stage or at its unveiling – is guaranteed to provoke interest in all aspects of history, society, heritage and national identity. Violent reactions are not uncommon – to a work’s cost, suitability, likeness, siting – to everything, indeed, save the aesthetic merit of the sculpture in question. Of course, the word sculpture must be used sparingly, for we are dealing, for the most part, with memorials in which sculptural criteria have been a low consideration, buried beneath the weight of sentiment that inevitably accrues to the public portrayal of an individual or the evocation of a historical moment.
DURING HIS SECOND STAY in England (1532–43), Hans Holbein made a series of drawings of sitters connected with the court of Henry VIII that ranks among his finest achievements. Most of these were discovered as a group pasted into an album in a bureau at Kensington Palace by Queen Caroline in 1728, and the majority are now in the Royal Collection, Windsor.
IT IS WELL KNOWN that only a portion of Leonardo da Vinci’s manuscripts and individual sheets of drawings survives. Various clues enable us to identify some of the lost compilations, the most famous being the Codex Huygens and the Libro A. The Codex Huygens (Pierpont Morgan Library, New York), by a Lombard artist working in the second half of the sixteenth century, is partially based on some of Leonardo’s lost drawings. Libro A, which has disappeared, has been reconstructed from passages of text and drawings copied by Francesco Melzi, a pupil of Leonardo, in his Libro di Pittura, and from Leonardo’s own Codex Leicester.
TORN APART BY religious quarrels and wars, the Southern and the Northern Netherlands were inundated by religious publications in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Among the Protestant texts, one of the most popular and authoritative was De Gheschiedenisse ende den doodt der vromer Martelaren (‘The histories and deaths of pious martyrs’) by Adriaen van Haemstede (c.1525–62/63), published in 1559, probably in Antwerp. The quarto book of more than 450 pages describes the lives and the gruesome deaths of martyrs, beginning with Christ himself, and ending with the Antwerp Protestants Cornelis Halewijn and Herman Jansz., who both died in the year the work was published. During the following centuries the book was often reprinted (with no fewer than twenty-four editions by 1747); the most recent edition dates from 1911. Earlier editions were usually updated to include recent martyrs and over the years additional information was added to the texts.
