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February 2025

Vol. 167 | No. 1463

Bartolini and Scotland

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Editorial

Cataloguing

It is one of the basic responsibilities of major collections to research and publish the works of art in their care. Such projects can take many years to mature and are often abandoned because of a lack of funding or shifting institutional priorities. It might be imagined, therefore, that because of these threats and the formidable cost of producing specialist and richly illustrated books, that collection catalogues would have become an extinct species. However, happily, a close reading of this Magazine in recent months would suggest otherwise, across a wide range of media and in terms of a broad chronological span.

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Exhibition Review

Figures du fou: Du Moyen Âge aux Romantiques

This dizzying, ambitious exhibition revolves around the figure of the fool from the thirteenth to the sixteenth and into the nineteenth century. For many viewers the fool will probably bring to mind a court jester, a comedic entertainer clothed in satin motley. However, by displaying a wide selection of works primarily from northern Europe in a range of media, of which painting is the least important, the curatorial team, led by Élisabeth Antoine-König and Pierre-Yves Le Pogam, demonstrate that during this period, the fool wore many faces.
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  • Detail of the Birth of the Virgin

    An Islamic tent in S. Antonio in Polesine, Ferrara

    By Federica Gigante

    The late thirteenth-century fresco in the apse of S. Antonio in Polesine, Ferrara, might be the only surviving full-size representation of a portable Islamic tent from this period. Serving as a virtual baldachin over the high altar, the tent recalls descriptions of the Andalusi structures seized during the wars of Christian expansion into al-Andalus. Its extraordinarily precise, illusionistic details suggests that it depicts an actual object, thereby providing vital testimony of the practice of displaying and reusing Islamic textiles in a Christian context.

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  • Crucifixion with the Virgin, Mary Magdalene, St Michael and donor presented by St Anthony Abbot

    Lucchese patronage in Papal Avignon: the chapel of Carlo Spiafame in Notre-Dame-des-Doms

    By Geoffrey Nuttall
    The chapel on the north-western corner of Avignon Cathedral was one of the most ambitious funerary spaces commissioned in the city by a member of the local Italian community during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, yet it has remained virtually unstudied. Built by Carlo Spiafame, a financier from Lucca, it includes a fresco of the Baptism of Christ and portraits of the donor and his family.
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  • Bathsheba in the bath

    Two paintings by Artemisia Gentileschi in the Potsdam collection of Frederick the Great

    By Franziska Windt
    The collection of Italian Baroque paintings in the Prussian king Frederick II’s New Palace, Potsdam, includes works by Artemisia Gentileschi, although the king was not aware that she had painted them. Using a combination of documentary, technical and stylistic evidence, new perspectives shed light on their origins, display and critical history.
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  • Charles Cumming (later Cumming Bruce) in Turkish dress

    The elder sisters of the ‘The Campbell sisters’: William Gordon Cumming’s patronage of Lorenzo Bartolini

    By Lucy Wood,Timothy Stevens
    Among Lorenzo Bartolini’s most celebrated works is ‘The Campbell sisters dancing a waltz’, ordered by the sitters’ brother, Walter. This article examines two busts of their elder sisters by Bartolini, carved in 1817–18. New light is also cast on the origins and date of ‘The Campbell sisters’ and on the patronage and collecting of Walter’s brother-in-law William Gordon Cumming at Altyre, Morayshire.
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  • View of the siege of Castro.

    ‘Victory at San Pietro inCasale’ in the Galleria Doria Pamphilj, Rome

    By Stephanie C. Leone,Alessandro Serrani
    Over time, much about the monumental painting in the Galleria Doria Pamphilj, Rome, called the ‘Battle of Castro’, which is currently attributed to Jacques Courtois (known as il Borgognone; 1621–76) and Carlo Maratta (1625–1713), has been obscured. However, archival evidence and a closer reading of the primary sources can refine our knowledge of the circumstances of the commission, subject-matter and attribution.
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  • Shipwreck on a rocky coast

    Ménage de Pressigny and his art collection

    By Yuriko Jackall
    In a recent article in this Magazine by the present author, new information about the private life of the French ‘fermier général’ (tax farmer) François-Marie Ménage de Pressigny (1734–94) was presented in support of the argument that he was none other than the elusive ‘man of the Court’ who commissioned ‘The swing’ (1767; Wallace Collection, London) directly from Jean-Honoré Fragonard (1732– 1806) in 1767. However, other, less sensational findings relating to Ménage de Pressigny had to be glossed over in the interests of concision. This shorter notice aims to lay out some of this additional information.
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  • Wooded lake

    Lusieri’s mysterious ‘Wooded lake’ identified

    By Dyfri Williams
    One of the most tantalising of all the watercolours by Giovanni Battista Lusieri (1754–1821) hangs in the private sitting-room of Lord and Lady Elgin in Broomhall, Fife. It is a beautifully tranquil scene encompassing a large, curving expanse of water with thickly wooded shores rising on all sides; in the far distance, rolling hills reveal a more open landscape that includes a conspicuous, reddish building.
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