Nicholas Penny is a former director of the National Gallery. He is cataloguing the earlier Italian paintings at the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, with Imogen Tedbury.
“Longhi’s metaphors are sometimes arcane, but they can also be familiar. When he considers the way Piero alternated colours, reversed shapes and repeated froms, he invokes not only chess and heraldry but also the shirts of opposing football teams. The threads of light on the Virgin’s veil are likened to harp strings, but also to cheese in the making.”
Sometimes, walking in the woods on a Saturday afternoon, my mother and I came across the local racecourse. She would put the dog on its lead and I would approach the white rails where the horses – with their mad eyes, soft telescopic nostrils, bulging veins and bony legs – were being restrained in front of the nooses stretched across the track by tense, hunched dwarfs in brilliant...
Almost every North American museum of art today includes a gallery of modern and contemporary work, and little separates the colonial furniture, the Romantic waterfall and the careworn Rodin nude from the huge splashy hieroglyph, the bold candy-striped canvas, the colossal obese sunbather and the flashing neon message. Things are different in Europe, but contemporary artists are nonetheless...
On the afternoon of 15 November 1979 the Prime Minister announced in the House of Commons that Anthony Blunt, retired Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures, fellow of the British Academy, former director of the Courtauld Institute, and the most influential figure in the establishment of art history as an academic subject in this country had indeed, as Private Eye had intimated a week before,...
Balthus first attracted notice early in 1934 with a small exhibition at the Galerie Pierre in Paris. Several of the works he showed – The Street, The Window and Alice – seem as startling now as they must have done then. This Catalogue raisonné, published not long before the artist’s death earlier this year, enables us to determine the unremarkable ingredients that so...
Nicholas Penny looks through the letters of Prince Hermann von Pückler-Muskau, who visited England in the late 1820s.
Nicholas Penny, former director of the National Gallery, explains how Kenneth Clark transformed the National Gallery as director from 1934 to 1945, with a look at the Myra Hess concerts and Clark's wide-ranging...
There are two forces at work in sculpture. One pushes it towards the waxwork, where materials suggest something quite contrary to their native qualities – marble flesh, wooden flowers,...
When I used to give a survey course for first-year students, I dreaded December. That was when I reached the High Renaissance and my audience fell away. It was not only the alternative seasonable...
Richard Payne Knight was an important English intellectual of the era of the French Revolution. He flourished from the 1770s until his death, perhaps by suicide, in 1824. Most of that time he...
Here, at last, is a book of which we can sincerely say in the old phrase that it meets a long-felt want. It offers, in the modest words of the Preface, ‘a series of illustrations (which are...
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