The Unfortunate Posset

Alice Hunt: Your Majesty’s Dog, 26 December 2024

The Scapegoat: The Brilliant Brief Life of the Duke of Buckingham 
by Lucy Hughes-Hallett.
Fourth Estate, 630 pp., £30, October 2024, 978 0 00 812655 1
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... and Gerbier began to amass an enviable collection of Italian and Dutch artworks (including by Titian, Tintoretto, Bassano and Rubens). John Tradescant was the gardener, sourcing extraordinary curiosities for Buckingham’s delight: an elephant’s head, Pocahontas’s father’s seashell robe.Hughes-Hallett is clear that Buckingham ‘recognised, wanted ...

Gestures of Embrace

Nicholas Penny, 27 October 1988

Rembrandt’s Enterprise: The Studio and the Market 
by Svetlana Alpers.
Thames and Hudson, 160 pp., £20, May 1988, 0 226 01514 9
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The Light of Early Italian Painting 
by Paul Hills.
Yale, 160 pp., £20, March 1987, 0 300 03617 5
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Italian Paintings in the Robert Lehman Collection 
by John Pope-Hennessy.
Metropolitan Museum and Princeton, 331 pp., £50, December 1987, 0 87099 479 4
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... intentions as an artist but it is not the major obstacle it is when we study Raphael, say, or Titian, or any art which is considered preliminary to one of the great European traditions – Rembrandt has never been considered as preliminary in this way. His imitators never advanced on his achievement. Art which certainly is regarded as preliminary is Greek ...

Unreal Food Uneaten

Julian Bell: Sitting for Vanessa, 13 April 2000

The Art of Bloomsbury 
edited by Richard Shone.
Tate Gallery, 388 pp., £35, November 1999, 1 85437 296 3
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First Friends 
by Ronald Blythe.
Viking, 157 pp., £25, October 1999, 0 670 88613 0
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Bloomsbury in France 
by Mary Ann Caws and Sarah Bird Wright.
Oxford, 430 pp., £25, December 1999, 0 19 511752 2
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... through the German-inspired, anti-Latin Pre-Raphaelites and through Blake’s blasts at Rubens and Titian all the way to Hogarth’s onslaught on imported art in general, resurface querulously in the critical rhetoric of turn-of-millennium Euro-England. John McEwen’s phrase about the ‘fickle pursuit of French fashion’ catches one end of the tone. Adrian ...

Long Spells of Looking

Peter Campbell: Pretty Rothko, 17 September 1998

Mark Rothko 
edited by Jeffrey Weiss.
Yale/National Gallery of Art, Washington, 352 pp., £40, April 1998, 0 300 07505 7
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Mark Rothko: The Works on Canvas 
by David Anfam.
Yale/National Gallery of Art, Washington, 708 pp., £75, August 1998, 0 300 07489 1
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... a process which moved towards a correct result just as systematically as the repeated strokes in a Titian drawing move towards a correct result. These are not in any sense paintings you could order over the telephone. There are dull bits and shiny bits, cloudy shapes and firmer ones. The brush-marks are various, they are as firmly structured and yet as ...

Dishonoured

Michael Wood, 5 May 1983

The Rapes of Lucretia: A Myth and Its Transformation 
by Ian Donaldson.
Oxford, 203 pp., £15, October 1982, 0 19 812638 7
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The Rape of Clarissa 
by Terry Eagleton.
Blackwell, 109 pp., £10, September 1982, 0 631 13031 4
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Samuel Richardson: A Man of Letters 
by Carol Houlihan Flynn.
Princeton, 342 pp., £17.70, May 1982, 0 691 06506 3
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... book are unequal, since Lucretia has all the thunder (St Augustine, Cranach, Botticelli, Veronese, Titian, Tie-polo, Machiavelli, Shakespeare, Richardson, Pushkin), and Brutus only the lighter cavalry (Mlle de Scudéry, Voltaire, Alfieri, Nathaniel Lee, Gavin Hamilton, J.-L. David). However, Donaldson sharply registers the enormous popularity of the myth ...

What we think about painting

John Barrell, 25 June 1987

Past and Present in Art and Taste: Selected Essays 
by Francis Haskell.
Yale, 256 pp., £20, March 1987, 0 300 03607 8
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... attributed to Giorgione, but is now apparently coming to look more and more like the work of Titian. A part of this essay is concerned to question the traditional provenance of the painting, but it soon develops into an analysis of how differently the painting has been described and enjoyed throughout its history. And then, Haskell suddenly asks: ‘does ...

The Rack, the Rapier, the Ruff and the Fainting Nun

Nicholas Penny: Manet/Velázquez, 10 July 2003

Manet/Velázquez: The French Taste for Spanish Painting 
by Gary Tinterow and Geneviève Lacambre et al.
Yale, 592 pp., £50, March 2003, 0 300 09880 4
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... Spain the paintings they had confiscated for the Musée Napoléon in the Louvre. Major works (by Titian, Raphael and probably Van Eyck, as well as by Spanish artists) which had been illegally removed and found their way into private collections in London or Paris were not returned. And Marshal Soult was allowed to keep his many artistic trophies, among them ...

Eyeballs v. Optics

Julian Bell: Western art, 13 December 2001

Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters 
by David Hockney.
Thames and Hudson, 296 pp., £35, October 2001, 0 500 23785 9
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... a mobile viewer. About eighty years later, we get 5) ‘painterliness’: Giorgione, emulated by Titian, leaves off applying colour to already drawn objects to rely on the open-ended, fluid brushstroke, as a way of prompting the viewer to share the painter’s pleasure in the process of conjuring up the object. Then in 1600 there is the phenomenon known in ...

From Norwich to Naples

Anthony Grafton, 28 April 1994

The Civilisation of Europe in the Renaissance 
by John Hale.
HarperCollins, 648 pp., £25, November 1993, 0 00 215339 4
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... energy and attentiveness remain undimmed as he moves on to Rosso. Parmigianino, Brueghel and Titian, laying due weight in each case on the conquest of unexplored forms and the cultivation of an individual style. A third section – which begins, significantly, with an epigraph from Freud’s The Future of an Illusion – deals with ...

Giorgio Mio

Nicholas Penny, 16 November 1995

Giorgio Vasari: Art and History 
by Patricia Lee Rubin.
Yale, 449 pp., £35, April 1995, 0 300 04909 9
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... defend artistic integrity against the importunities of patrons. And we notice, too, the care that Titian and Barocci took not to be drawn into the service of a great prince, preferring to supply work to them from a distance. These painters sensed that devotion to their art, cultivation of the highest artistic standards became more difficult with senior ...

Mantegna’s Classical World

Charles Hope, 19 June 1980

The ‘Triumphs of Caesar’ by Andrea Mantegna in the Collection of Her Majesty the Queen at Hampton Court 
by Andrew Martindale.
Harvey Miller, 342 pp., £38, October 1979, 9780905203164
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... or that they were aesthetically inferior to the more recent work there by Giulio Romano and Titian. Indeed, throughout the 16th century the name of Mantegna, alone among his contemporaries, repeatedly appeared in lists of the greatest modern painters; and it was principally on the Triumphs that his reputation was based. These were virtually the only ...

Chips

Nicholas Penny, 18 March 1982

Michelangelo and the Language of Art 
by David Summers.
Princeton, 626 pp., £26.50, February 1981, 0 691 03957 7
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Bernini in France: An Episode in 17th-Century History 
by Cecil Gould.
Weidenfeld, 158 pp., £12.95, March 1982, 0 297 77944 3
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... those which Leonardo stars over his gloomiest rocks,’ wrote Pater. ‘No forest-scenery like Titian’s fills his backgrounds, but only blank ranges of rock, and dim vegetable forms as blank as they, as in a world before the creation of the first five days.’ Condivi must, in fact, have been defending Michelangelo against the claims made for the very ...

Making it

Nicholas Penny, 5 November 1992

The Sculpture of Jacopo Sansovino 
by Bruce Boucher.
Yale, 304 pp., £95, November 1991, 0 300 04759 2
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Giambattista and Lorenzo Bregno: Venetian Sculpture in the High Renaissance 
by Anne Markham Schulz.
Cambridge, 564 pp., £85, November 1991, 0 521 38406 0
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... highly agitated figures, but also noting how the composition was adapted by Sansovino’s friend Titian for the painting of the Entombment which is now in the Prado. The blending of the figures with each other and with the setting – Mary melting into her companions, Joseph of Arimathea clinging to the body of Christ, the outstretched arms of the Magdalene ...

Saint Shakespeare

Barbara Everett, 19 August 2010

... Hamlet and Lear can haunt the mind in a way that eclipses even the magnificent faces of Dürer and Titian. Shakespeare in fact embodies in his work a great change in 16th-century culture. During the late 15th and early 16th centuries, major European artists came to work in England. In these decades, King’s College chapel was completed, Holbein achieved his ...

Planes, Trains and SUVs

Jonathan Raban: James Meek, 7 February 2008

We Are Now Beginning Our Descent 
by James Meek.
Canongate, 295 pp., £16.99, February 2008, 978 1 84195 988 7
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... traces of snow in the woods not long before.’ I think this tableau is probably meant to recall Titian’s Diana and Actaeon, in which the severed stag’s head stands on a plinth above the nude and cringing figure of the huntress, and serves as an omen for the unwary Actaeon. (Since Meek grew up in nearby Dundee, it’s worth mentioning that the ...