Search results for ""ad ilissum""

Roger Fry (1866–1934) is best known as a champion of Post-Impressionism and a pioneer of Modernist art criticism. But his fi rst love was early Italian painting, on which he became a recognized authority, publishing a monograph on Giovanni Bellini in 1899. Even after the Post-Impressionist exhibitions in 1910 and 1912 and the foundation of the Omega Workshops, Fry continued to write and lecture on Italian art right up until his death. He looked at modernism through Quattrocento eyes rather than the other way around, as is often wrongly assumed. It is impossible not to be struck by how fresh and immediately readable his writings are, how pioneering in some ways his approach remains. His work on Italian art modifi es the received view of him as a pure formalist. Apart from a famous article on Giotto which Fry republished in Vision and Design (1920), the writings on Italian art are relatively little known, and a selection of the best of them is republished here, thus introducing an important aspect of Fry’s many-sided work to a new audience. The fi rst part of the book sets Fry’s writing on Italian art into context by combining intellectual biography with the history of art history, art criticism and art institutions. It draws on new documentary material, including Fry’s travel notebooks, which contain sketches and brilliant observations taken down in front of works of art. By exploring the whole range of Fry’s published and unpublished writings, the author is able to refute erroneous received ideas – that he was uninterested in colour, for example. The infl uence of his Italian lectures and publications on such fi gures as E.M. Forster, Kenneth Clark and Michael Baxandall is also examined. The second part consists of writings by Fry – each with an introductory text by the author and fully illustrated in colour. Included in this volume are some of the unpublished lectures that his biographer Virginia Woolf suggested would make a fascinating book of extracts. Four long pieces are of outstanding interest – on Uccello, Piero della Francesca, Baldovinetti and Piero di Cosimo, all artists whose critical status was radically re-examined in the twentieth century. Fry had a close and lifelong connection with The Burlington Magazine, as cofounder, contributor, saviour-fundraiser, editor (1909-1919) and adviser. Roger Fry and Italian Art is appropriately the fi rst in a series of books on art history to be published by The Burlington Magazine and Ad Ilissvm in association - to be announced in due course.

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The distinguished private collection, known as the Griffin Collection, comprises in its entirety examples of every category of ring – signet, devotional, memorial, decorative – dating from antiquity to modern times. This catalogue, focusing on about 150 rings in the collection, is concerned with perhaps the most personal rings of all, those associated with love and marriage. Some can be recognised by the figure of Cupid armed with his quiver of golden arrows, others by the symbols of heart and clasped hands. However, the majority are gold bands, sometimes plain and occasionally decorated, that are inscribed with mottoes in English expressing the admiration, affection, and pledges of fidelity which bind humankind together. Known as posies or little poems because they often rhyme, these mottoes were current on rings from the late Middle Ages until the middle of the 19 th century. Through these rings, Ms. Scarisbrick engagingly tells the long story of the relations between the sexes from the fifteenth century, when the cult of courtly love was superseded by an idealization of monogamous marriage, to an end in the twentieth century as a result of a different moral outlook. Scholars would agree that the Griffin Collection of posy rings makes an important contribution to English social history and connects with the national literature from Chaucer to Byron. Small though they are in scale, their significance was appreciated by Victorian collectors, and they are well represented in the leading museums, notably the Victoria and Albert Museum, the British Museum, and the Museum of London, as well as the Ashmolean and Fitzwilliam museums in Oxford and Cambridge. Yet none of these institutions have ever published fully illustrated catalogues of their posy rings, nor has there been an up-to-date study since the seminal monograph by Joan Evans entitled English Posies and Posy rings (1931). In this respect, the catalogue of the Griffin Collection, which illustrates the rings and sets them in context, using wide-ranging literary and historical sources, breaks new ground. It also contains posy rings with inscriptions hitherto unrecorded and others with identified maker’s marks.

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This fascinating and beautifully illustrated book presents for the first time the rediscovered frescoes painted by Andrea Sacchi (1599–1661) for the loggia of Cardinal del Monte’s Roman palace near via di Ripetta, Rome. Considered lost by generations of scholars, Andrea Sacchi’s fresco cycle has survived in a private apartment in Rome. Largely unpublished and rarely mentioned in recent literature, the frescoes underwent a revelatory restoration in 2010–11. For the past three years, the author was granted exclusive access to study them thoroughly – resulting in this monograph. Accompanied by beautiful and full photographic documentation, this study compares the painted images with the detailed description given by the biographer Giovan Pietro Bellori; it sheds light on the iconography and style, above all with respect to the sources used; and integrates this key commission within Sacchi’s early career. The cycle’s iconography is explored with careful verification of early sources that now allows us to resolve some particularly complex problems of interpretation – above all those relating to alchemy. Cardinal del Monte’s Palazzo di Ripetta housed a fully equipped pharmacological laboratory. Research on this cycle of frescoes has also made it possible to discover new archival evidence regarding Sacchi’s date and place of birth.

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This stunning catalogue presents an exceptional collection of rare Burmese silver. Accompanied by detailed photographs and explanatory texts, this ground-breaking book proposes a new way of looking at Burmese silver. Names, dates, places, and stories – identifying the who, when, where, and what of Burmese silver has been the focus of publications on the topic. Are these questions the best way to understand silver, however? Alexandra Green argues that they are not. Too few pieces provide reliable information about silversmiths, production locations, and dates to allow for a comprehensive understanding of the subject. Instead, a close examination of silver patterns reveals strong links with Burmese art history reaching as far back as the Bagan period (11th- to 13th-centuries), connections with contemporary artistic trends, and participation within the wider world of silversmithing. The first European to write about Burmese silver was H. L. Tilly, a colonial official from the late 19th- into the early 20th-century. Tasked with collecting objects for various fairs and exhibitions, he took an interest in Burmese art, publishing articles and books from the 1880s onwards. While much of what he wrote was factually inaccurate and coloured by the prejudices and stereotypes common at the time, his two volumes on Burmese silver published in 1902 and 1904 contain pictures of pieces from the early to mid 19th-century. These enable a reconstruction of how silver designs evolved as the country was absorbed into the Indian Raj, and British and other Westerners became consumers of local silver products. Tilly was also correct in his interest in silver designs. Green uses the visual information from his books to describe the continuities and innovations of designs found on silver from the mid 19th through the mid 20th-century, and she places these trends within local, regional, and global flows of ideas. Many studies of Burmese silver have been plagued by a lack of understanding of the Burmese context. In contrast, Green examines silver from a local perspective, drawing on Burmese texts and information that allows for a nuanced view of the motifs, designs, and patterns that appear repetitively on silver pieces. Using Graham Honeybill's collection, formed over many years, as a basis, she explores how designs and patterns circulated around the country and were innovatively combined and recombined on pieces by silversmiths producing objects for Burmese, Western, and commercial clients.

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