Burlington Contemporary is the Burlington Magazine’s free online platform for reviews and research on international contemporary art.
Burlington Contemporary is the Burlington Magazine’s free online platform for reviews and research on international contemporary art.
PAST EDITORIALS IN this Magazine have frequently discussed the difficulties facing many museums and galleries throughout Britain. In spite of moments of considerable optimism and a heightened public awareness of the plight of regional collections, the future for many remains uncertain, even bleak. In investigations of several individual cases, the litany of woes includes, above all, a shortage of funds, diminishing numbers of effective curators, unsympathetic local authorities, restricted acquisition policies and the limitations imposed on institutions by misguided directives at national and local levels. But, as can be seen from the specific examples considered below, such woes are not the experience of all museums. In the last decade, for instance, a number of success stories have emerged through the transformation of a museum (or a group of museums in larger conurbations) into a charitable trust (e.g. Sheffield and York).
IN HIS Entretiens sur les vies et sur les ouvrages des plus excellents peintres anciens et modernes, André Félibien makes this curious statement about Alessandro Turchi (1578–1649), called ‘l’Orbetto Veronese’:
‘On rencontre peu de ses Tableaux, parce que la pluspart ont esté portez en Espagne; aussi ne travailloit-il quasi que pour ceux de cette nation, & n’avoit aucun commerce avec les François, & mesme fort peu avec les Italiens’.
WHEN CARAVAGGIO entered the conventual church of St John the Baptist in Valletta for the first time in July 1607, he would have noticed to his right, beyond the first bay on the south side, a large portal leading into a long hall that was about to be completed. This was the Oratory of the Decollato (Fig.15), where the Confraternita della Misericordia (also known as the Compagnia or Società della Misericordia) congregated. Here, a year later, the artist was to paint the greatest masterpiece of his Maltese phase, the monumental altarpiece The beheading of St John the Baptist.
DONALD GARSTANG died after a determined fight against cancer on 23rd June. For over thirty years he had been a familiar figure in the London art world, working first at Colnaghi and subsequently with his former colleague there, Luca Baroni. Garstang’s rigorous scholarship informed his consistently authoritative catalogue entries and set a standard to which few others in the field could aspire. His mind was probing and restless, and its development can best be sensed in the differences between his pioneering Giacomo Serpotta and the Stuccatori of Palermo, 1560–1790, published by Zwemmer in 1984, and the revised edition, Giacomo Serpotta e i Serpottiani, Stuccatori a Palermo, 1656–1790, issued in 2006. For like all serious scholars, Garstang constantly sought to probe his findings and was able to reconsider his earlier conclusions in the light of new information, for much of which he was himself responsible. Significant articles in THE BURLINGTON MAGAZINE, Antologia di Belle Arte (notably ‘Ignazio Marobitti and Patrician Tombs in Eighteenth-Century Palermo’) and elsewhere complemented Garstang’s work on Serpotta, and had he lived they would no doubt have been the building blocks of a sustained study of Palermitan sculpture.
