2023
Monday 15th May
Patricia Rocco spoke on
Early Modern Collecting and the Shifting Cabinet of Curiosities
Ulysses Aldrovandi had established one of the largest naturalist collections of his day in 16th century Bologna, including all manner of exotic flora and fauna. His collection was meant to be categorized, catalogued, and illustrated for the benefit of scientific study and learning. At his death, his collection was deeded to the city and university for study, and eventually came to be part of the collection of the 17th century aristocrat, Ferdinando Cospi. However, at this stage the collection had shifted from purely a scientific endeavor to one focusing on wonder and meraviglia, a true Wunderkammer or cabinet of curiosities as befitted the interests of its owner. This talk traces the aesthetic choices and intellectual modifications/mutability that were necessary for that transformation to take place and that made one collection drastically different in form and function than the other. Aldrovandi’s collection was intent on collecting all specimens available to create an encyclopedic collection of nature for the serious study of scientists as well as artists, whereas Cospi’s collection was that of an aristocrat intent on eliciting wonder and awe from his illustrious guests. The wunderkammer was modelled on the aristocratic collections of prestigious families such as the Medici, whose expected audience were intimate and important friends, as opposed to Aldrovandi’s more open and democratic focus on sharing with the scholarly public. Therefore, this collection went from the pedagogical and scientific to the more conspicuous display of soft power and cultural prestige.
Patricia Rocco received her PhD from the Graduate Center, CUNY, and is an Adjunct Professor of Art History at Hunter College, Manhattan School of Music, and Cooper Union. She has published articles on women artists, gender, and material culture, especially women’s work with textiles. Her book The Devout Hand: Women, Virtue, and Visual Culture in Early Modern Italy has recently been published by McGill-Queen’s University Press. Rocco has also published two chapters on popular prints and games in the early modern world: “Virtuous Vices: Giuseppe Maria Mitelli’s Gambling Prints and the Social Mapping of Leisure and Gender in Post-Tridentine Bologna,” in Playthings in Early Modernity, Party Games, Word Games, Mind Games, edited by Allison Levy, Medieval Institute Publications, 2017; “The World Upside Down: Giuseppe Maria Mitelli’s Games and the Performance of Identity in the Early Modern World,” in Games and Game Playing in Early Modern Art and Literature, edited by Robin O’ Bryan, Amsterdam University Press, 2018.
Monday 20th March
Dr. Ana Cabrera Collecting Spanish Decorative Arts in Britain and Spain 1850-1945
Abstract:
Collecting Spain: Coleccionismo de artes decorativas españolas en Gran Bretaña y España / Collecting Spanish Decorative Arts in Britain and Spain (Madrid: Polifemo, 2022) examines the collecting of Spanish decorative arts between about 1850 and 1945, from both British and Spanish perspectives. It focuses on the period in which museums and private collectors in both countries valued and acquired different types of objects from Spain, such as ivory caskets, silk textiles, carpets, lustreware ceramics, furniture, jewellery and silverware. The essays reveal similarities and differences in approach in Britain and Spain, as well as the key figures involved and the differing national contexts in which their activities took place.
Dr Cabrera, the co-editor of the book, will highlight the role played by specific museums, such as the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, and by local, national and international exhibitions of the decorative arts, in disseminating knowledge about Spanish objects, historical and contemporary. In her talk, Dr Cabrera will also focus on the significant role of textiles in the history of taste and collecting in this period.
Ana Cabrera Lafuente
Ana Cabrera Lafuente has been a Spanish museum curator since 2001, with wide experience in historical textiles and historical dress/fashion. She has worked in different museums from 2001 to 2020, including The National Museum of Decorative Arts and Fashion Museum, both in Madrid. She was awarded a Marie S.-Curie Fellowship, developing the project Interwoven at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, between 2016 to 2018, after her Ph. in Late Antiquity and early medieval textiles from the Egypt at the Museu de Disseny (Barcelona).
She has been a member of several research projects related to historical textiles, museums, and cultural heritage. She is co-editor of Silk: Fibre, Fabric and Fashion (2020) and Collecting Spain: Collecting Spanish Decorative Arts in Britain and Spain (2021) and has curated ¡Extra, Moda! (2019) with Maria Prego and Tejidos y alfombras del Museo de La Alhambra (1997).
Monday 20th February
Dr. Gabriela Noriega spoke on
The Magic Mirror of Dr. Dee
Summoning spirits through the black stone: Dr. Dee’s Aztec mirror
The British Museum houses an obsidian mirror labelled “Magic Mirror of Doctor Dee”. It is displayed in the “Enlightenment Gallery” as an object pertaining to the realm of dark arts and Renaissance occultism. The caption states that this mirror, along with other materials associated with occult arts and divination, belonged to the astrologer, mathematician and magician John Dee (1527-1608/9). Dr. Dee is a fascinating character who is often placed at the limits of Natural philosophy and magic. His role as advisor and astrologer to Elizabeth I has also attracted attention to his peculiar figure. Next to the objects that are displayed in the same window case (a crystal ball and a set of “magical discs”), the “Magical Mirror of Dr. Dee” tells one story; a story that is associated with the inscription made in the hand of Horace Walpole (1717-1797), author of a gothic novel, amongst other things, which indicates that this is the “The Black Stone into which Dr Dee used to call his Spirits”. But the mirror has a B-side to it: as the museum’s label indicates, the mirror has an Aztec origin, and it has also been displayed alongside other Mexican pieces (e.g. Moctezuma: Aztec Ruler (24 September 2009 – 24 January 2010). Aztec obsidian mirrors are also displayed in other rooms inside the British Museum exhibiting materials associated with Aztec Culture. How does the meaning of an item change according to the mode in which it is exhibited? How has understanding of these Aztec objects altered through time according to the way in which they are displayed? This conversation will explore the shifting ways in which obsidian mirrors are displayed at the museum and the underlying assumptions that have framed the way viewers approach specific objects, particularly those associated with Mexico’s Prehispanic past.
Gabriela Villanueva Noriega is a full-time professor at the National Autonomous University of Mexico where she teaches courses on modern poetry and Early Modern literature in both English and Spanish. She is interested in tracing and problematizing the representation of “Mexican identity” in Early Modern European debates bearing in mind the forms of erasure and silencing that the debate often carried along with it. She has a Ph.D. in Hispanic Literature (Colegio de México, 2015) and a master’s degree in English Literature (UNAM, 2009).
Monday, 16 January, at 6 p.m (GMT)
Sara Ayres, Centre for Privacy Studies, Copenhagen University will talk on
Prince Otto of Hesse in Whitehall Palace, 1611
Hans Eworth (d.1574) Elizabeth I and the Three Goddesses, 1569, oil on panel, RCIN 403446
Abstract
This paper draws upon four manuscript accounts of Prince Otto von Hessen-Kassel’s princely tour in England and Scotland in 1611. From within this rich set of manuscripts, the paper focuses specifically on the account’s descriptions of James VI and I (1566-1625) and Anna of Denmark’s (1574-1619) rooms at Whitehall Palace, their connection with the Shield Gallery, or Waterside Gallery, with particular attention to the images and objects collected therein. I will consider how these objects and images constituted a thoughtfully deliberate display and suggest that this display worked cohesively to perform the consumption, digestion and assimilation of the Elizabethan cultural legacy by the new, Jacobean regime.
Dr Sara Ayres is currently an Associate Fellow affiliated with the Centre for Privacy Studies, Copenhagen University. She also teaches at Coventry University. Her research has been funded by the Carlsberg Foundation, Nordea Fonden, the Pasold Foundation, the Paul Mellon Centre and the Association of Art Historians. She has published on early modern art at the Jacobean courts in the Journal for Historians of Netherlandish Art and the Oxford Art Journal. Her monograph, Danish-British Consort Portraiture 1600-1900 is forthcoming with Lund Humphries in April 2023. She is currently just a few thousand words away from finishing off a critical edition of the diary of Prince George of Denmark’s visit to the Stuart court in 1669.
2022
Monday, 10th January, 2022 6 p.m.
Luís U. Afonso will speak on:
Before the Dutch: 16th century Portuguese porcelain imports
This talk discusses the reception and consumption of Chinese porcelain in Renaissance Iberia following the establishment of the Cape Route in 1497–9. It will show that by the mid-sixteenth century Chinese porcelain was already an inexpensive luxury to the upper and middle-upper segments of the urban population, who used these wares on a daily basis. This conclusion is largely based on Portuguese archival sources and data taken from archaeological excavations conducted in Portugal and former Portuguese Morocco. However, higher availability and affordability did not imply homogeneous consumption behaviour regarding Chinese porcelain. In fact, five major complementary consumption patterns can be differentiated in sixteenth-century Iberia: 1) porcelains as prized collectibles due to their expensive silver mounts; 2) porcelains as diplomatic gifts and pious offerings; 3) early chine de commande; 4) glass and porcelain chambers containing hundreds of porcelains; and 5) porcelains as lavish tableware used on a daily basis.
This talk offers an innovative view of a topic that has been chiefly analysed from an Anglo-Dutch historiographic perspective, too heavily dependent on the VOC’s archives and on an Anglo–Dutch bias against the Iberian Catholic empires. It also contributes to enriching the debate about globalisation and consumption of overseas cultural goods in Europe during the early modern era, emphasizing the asynchrony and diversity of local responses. Finally, it offers new data on the formation of the first porcelain cabinets in Europe, which begun to be developed during the second half of the sixteenth-century by female members of Iberian royalty and high aristocracy.
Luís U. Afonso is professor of art history at the Faculdade de Letras (School of Arts) of the University of Lisbon. He holds a BA (1995), an MA (1999), a PhD (2006) and an Agregação title (2017) in Art History. His research is mainly focused on Portuguese art (c.1350-c.1550), hybridization processes in Portuguese overseas art (c.1450-c.1600), and art markets. His publications include the volume Sephardic Book Art of the 15th century (Brepols, 2019) and several research papers published in history and art history journals (e.g., African Arts, Archivo Español de Arte, Artibus et Historiae, Burlington Magazine, International Journal of Arts Management, Journal of World History, Mande Studies, Mediterranean Studies, Mitteilungen der Carl Justi Vereinigung, Perspective, The Medieval History Journal, Viator and Wartburg-Jahrbuch).
Monday, 7th February 2022 at 6 p.m.
Amy Lim will speak on:
The 5th Earl and Countess of Exeter as late-seventeenth-century collectors of contemporary Italian art
Between 1678 and 1700, John Cecil, the ‘Travelling Earl’ of Exeter, and his countess Anne, undertook three extended journeys to Europe in order to buy furnishings and artworks for their newly refurbished country seat, Burghley House. While most Grand Tourists focussed their attention on Old Masters, the Exeters collected works by contemporary artists on a scale unmatched by their peers, acquiring several hundred paintings by over sixty different artists from across Italy. Their funerary monument, commissioned in Rome from Pierre-Etienne Monnot and based on papal tombs, presented them as sophisticated patrons of the arts.
This paper will consider the acquisition strategies and methods that shaped the Exeters’ collection. It will argue that the model for their collecting was found not in England, but among the great European art patrons whom they met on their travels, above all, Cosimo III de’ Medici.
Amy Lim is researching ‘Art and Aristocracy in late Stuart England’, in an AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Partnership with the University of Oxford and Tate. She has published articles on British art from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries in Furniture History, The Georgian Group Journal, First World War Studies, and Art & The Country House. Amy worked on the exhibition ‘British Baroque: Power and Illusion’ (Tate Britain, Feb-Mar 2020), and recently curated ‘Mind & Mortality: Stanley Spencer’s Final Portraits’, at the Watts Gallery.
Monday, 18th July, 2022 at 6 p.m. on Zoom
Adriana Concin will speak on:
Johanna of Austria (1547-1578) – An Austrian Archduchess on the Grand Ducal Throne of Tuscany
Johanna of Austria (1547-1578) has largely been judged unfairly by history. Born in Prague in 1547 as the last child of the Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand I and his wife, Queen Anna Jagiellonian of Hungary and Bohemia, Johanna was married in 1565 to the Medici prince (and later Grand Duke), Francesco I de’ Medici. Johanna was received in Florence with much pomp and grandeur; indeed, the celebrations for her wedding were among the most spectacular that Florence had ever seen. During her life as a Medici consort, however, Johanna struggled to assert dominance or command political influence over the Florentine court, and posthumously, her persona suffered further disservice at the hands of both historians and popular authors alike. Indeed, she has often been turned by the latter into a caricature of zealous piety, serving as a convenient foil to her husband’s mistress, the Venetian Bianca Capello. As with most women mistreated by the annals of history, after careful consideration of her life, a more nuanced picture emerges of Johanna. This talk aims to pay testament to Johanna of Austria and to unshackle her from passé, clichéd stereotypes. It does so by tracing her activities as a consort, patron, collector, papal favourite, as well as a pivotal member of the House of Habsburg. Moreover, in the second half of the sixteenth century, Florence was a rapidly changing cultural hub and, as will be shown, Johanna of Austria was far from a mere spectator to the cultural, artistic, and socio-political transformations taking place within Tuscan dominions.
Adriana Concin is currently an Exhibition Research Assistant at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. She completed her doctoral studies at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London in 2021 with a dissertation focused on the 1565 wedding of Francesco I de’ Medici and the Habsburg Archduchess Johanna of Austria and its wider cultural implications. She has been the recipient of several fellowships, including the Eva Schler fellowship at the Medici Archive Project in Florence and the Studia Rudolphina fellowship in Prague at the Institute of Art History of the Czech Academy of Sciences. Adriana has also held the Ayesha Bulchandani graduate internship at the Frick Collection in New York. Her research interests lie in sixteenth-century collecting, cultural exchanges between Tuscany and the Holy Roman Empire, and female patronage networks. She has published on the cultural relationships between Emperor Rudolf II and Francesco I de’ Medici (Studia Rudolphina, 2021), and the frescoes of Habsburg cityscapes in the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence (Burlington Magazine, 2019).
Monday, 3rd October
Dr. Angelica Groom; The Collecting and Display of Zoological Curiosities at the Medici Court in Florence
Abstract:
The collecting of zoological rarities during the early modern era played a significant role in the self-fashioning of the courtly elite, both in Europe and beyond. The Medici family, from the beginning of their reign in 1532 as Dukes of Florence and from 1569 to 1737 as Grand Dukes of Tuscany, were enthusiastic collectors of rare fauna. This paper will focus specifically on these collecting practices and on the display of animals within the setting of the Florentine court. Collecting interests varied among different members of the Medici regime and tracing these interests across the lifespan of the dynasty will highlight both the changing priorities in the display of the zoological collection and shifting attitudes towards animals more broadly.
The Medici rulers collected and displayed animals in various forms: animal parts and taxidermied specimens formed part of the Wunderkammer collections and were exhibited alongside other exotica in various designated settings of the court, including the Tribuna at the Uffizi and the Guardaroba (now known as the Map Room) of the Palazzo Vecchio. Animals, especially exotic fauna imported into Europe from distant parts of the globe (Africa, Asia, and the Americas), were also collected in living form. Their procurement was achieved by diverse means; animals entered the collection in the form of gifts, or they were sourced via agents who were stationed in various European port cities, such as Venice, Seville, Amsterdam, where exotic commodities were being traded. The species that survived the ordeal of long sea and land voyages were destined to be displayed in the two mini zoos established by the Medici family – the Serraglio de leoni near San Marco, and the later Sarraglio degli animali rari in the Boboli Gardens, as well as in the paradisical settings of the Medici’s magnificent gardens, located in and around Florence.
Biography:
Dr Angelica Groom is principal lecturer in the School of Art and Media and on the programme of History of Art and Design at the University of Brighton. She is the author of a recently published monograph Exotic Animals in the Art and Culture of the Medici Court in Florence (Brill, October 2018), as well as several book chapters relating to art, animals, collecting and natural history.
Monday, 7th November at 6 p.m.
Elizabeth Pergam will talk on
The Anglicization of Samuel Mendel: Collecting British Art in Mid-Victorian Manchester
Over the course of more than twenty years of active acquisition, Manchester “Merchant Prince” Samuel Mendel (1814-1884) filled his Manley Hall estate with an extensive collection of contemporary British paintings and drawings. This paper will analyze Mendel’s buying (and selling) patterns, his association with the Manchester dealer Thomas Agnew & Sons, and the public auction billed as one of the most important sales of British art held at Christie’s in 1875. Previous assessments of Mendel have portrayed his art collection as disconnected from any connoisseurial concerns; a close analysis of Agnew’s stock books, the catalogues of the Manley Hall collection, and press coverage of the collection, suggest otherwise. Rather, Mendel was constantly expanding and upgrading his collection. Unlike the cosmopolitanism of the Rothschilds, Mendel chose instead to double down on the culture of the nation to which his parents had immigrated from Germany. Further, Mendel’s assimilation of middle-class mores in the form of art collecting reflects the preoccupation of German-Jewish Mancunians as they distinguished themselves from the newer Eastern European arrivals who came to this northern, industrial city beginning in the 1840s. The collection’s emphasis on the work of artists associated with the Royal Academy led the Art Journal to deem it “a perfect epitome of the story of English painting.” Mendel’s art collection, then, visualizes the process of Anglicization that was central to Mancunian-Jewish identity in this period.
Elizabeth A. Pergam received her PhD from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. Her research focuses on the fields of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century art, the history of museums, exhibitions, collecting, and the art market. She has published widely, including The Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition of 1857: Entrepreneurs, Connoisseurs and the Public (2011) and Drawing in the 21st Century: The Politics and Poetics of Contemporary Practice (2015). Her essays ‘Selling Pictures: The Illustrated Auction Catalogue’ and ‘John Charles Robinson in 1868: A Victorian Curator’s Collection on the Block’ have appeared in the Journal of Art Historiography. Elizabeth’s Master’s Thesis at The Courtauld Institute of Art examined the anti-semitic graphic satire of the campaign in 1753 to repeal the Jewish Naturalization Act. Her current project focuses on the history of collecting in America.
Monday, 5 December
Gabriella Cirucci, University of Copenhagen will speak to us on
Collecting in Greek and Roman Sacred Spaces. The case of Apellesʼ Aphrodite Anadyomene.
Abstract:
Looking at Greek and Roman sacred spaces through the lens of the history of collecting and museums has often led scholars to identify antecedents of modern concepts, practices, and institutions of cultural heritage in Greco-Roman antiquity. This paper proposes some reflections on several, still controversial aspects of these analogies by focusing on the itinerary of the Aphrodite Anadyomene by Apelles, which unfolds between the sanctuary of Asklepiosat Kos, where it was originally dedicated, and the Temple of the deified Caesar in Rome, where it was translocated under Augustus.
Through the case of the Anadyomene, this paper tackles the impact of celebrated masterpieces of art on Greek and Roman sanctuaries by taking into account the religious, social, political, economic, and cultural embeddedness of the artefacts accumulated in Greek and Roman sacred spaces, in order to question how far the artefacts kept in sacred treasuries might be the primary motivation for travelling and sightseeing; to investigate ancient views on cultural property and its displacement; and to explore ancient attitudes towards conservation.
Biography:
Gabriella Cirucci is Marie Sklodowska-Curie Fellow at the SAXO Institute of the University of Copenhagen, where she is carrying out the project “REFRAME. Greek Funerary and Votive Reliefs Reused for Display in the Ancient Mediterranean. A Long-term, Interdisciplinary, and Cross-cultural Approach”.
She obtained her PhD in Classical Archaeology from the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa (2008). Her doctoral thesis dealt with the reuse of Greek artworks of the 5h and 4th centuries B.C.E. in Roman times. She has been postdoctoral fellow at the Scuola Normale (2013-2017) carrying out the project Nobilia opera? Displaying reused Greek sculpture in Roman contexts: a case study towards a history of restoration in Classical Antiquity as a part of the project Beyond Pliny directed by Gianfranco Adornato. She was visiting Scholar at the Getty Research Institute for the annual theme Object-Value-Canon (2014); in 2019 she received a grant under the NWO funded VICI project Innovating Objects. The impact of global connections and the formation of the Roman Empire (ca. 200-30 BC), directed by Miguel John Versluys at the University of Leiden.
During her doctoral and postdoctoral periods, she also developed a strong interest in the History of collecting antiquities from the 15th to the 18th centuries and in Digital Humanities. She coordinated the project Aedes Barberinae (2007-2012), directed by Lucia Faedo at the University of Pisa and contributed to the projects Le voci del marmo (2012) and Monumentarariora (2001-2007), directed by Salvatore Settis at the Scuola Normale.
Among her recent publications are the co-edited volumes: Re-staging Greek Artworks in Roman Times (Milano: LED 2018) and Beyond “Art Collections”: Owning and Accumulating Objects from Greek Antiquity to the Early Modern Period (Berlin: De Gruyter 2020).
2021
Monday, 11th October, at 6 p.m.
Victoria Jenner on:
“I find so much to do about the house” – Lady Charlotte Anne Montagu Douglas Scott née Thynne (1811-1895) and her instrumental role in the reconstruction of Montagu House, a Victorian London Town House (1863–1939)
New Montagu House was the main London residence of Lady Charlotte Anne Montagu Douglas Scott, 5th Duchess of Buccleuch and Queensberry (1811–1895) and her husband, Walter Francis Scott (1806-1884) between 1863 and 1884. It served as an entertainment venue, offering them the ability to pursue political and social manoeuvring among Court circles and elite society. Its role in the public sphere played a crucial role in fostering wider interest in the French decorative arts and the Second Empire style in Britain. However, as the ducal residence has so far been credited to her husband, Lady Charlotte Anne’s agency has been omitted from history.
This paper is a case study of the redesign, rebuilding and refurnishing of her house in Whitehall. It particularly concentrates upon the role of Lady Charlotte Anne in the design process and pays attention to her correspondence with a highly skilled network of architects, artists and craftspeople. It charts the rise of her activities from the 1830s through to the 1870s, examining her first rebuilding and refurnishing project to her last, suggesting her personal evolution from a fashion-conscious consumer to a connoisseur and tastemaker. It additionally seeks to uncover her unknown friendship with Lady Cecil Kerr and opens up another line of enquiry regarding her role in the Tractarian movement in Scotland.
Finally, the paper will draw upon untapped archival material from the Buccleuch Living Heritage Archive and bring together previously unseen correspondence with understudied designs, plans and photographs from a range of sources. This micro-study aims to challenge ideas about how female patrons fitted into the existing architectural historiography of the Victorian period and explores how issues of patronage, acquisition and display were deployed for political, social and philanthropic purposes.
Victoria Jenner is a recent postgraduate of the Wallace Collection and University of Buckingham Masters programme in Historic Interiors, receiving Distinction and an academic award for ‘Best Performance’. She has previously worked at Waddesdon Manor and is currently leading the digitisation of Colnaghi’s Archive in London. Victoria has recently been awarded the status of Outreach Fellow for the University of Exeter and additionally volunteers for the Society for the History of Collecting.
Monday, 8th November, Francesca S. Croce on:
Collecting Baroque in America: Masterpieces from the Croce Collection
Scientist Carlo M. Croce (b. 1944) bought his first painting at the age of 12. Since then, driven by a fervent passion for discovery, he has amassed the largest private collection of Italian Baroque paintings in the United States. The first part of the presentation addresses his thought processes, objectives and challenges as a collector. The second explores some of the collection’s most famous works—from a Lanfranco formerly in the collection of Taddeo Barberini, to one of the largest drawings by Guercino. Lastly, it also touches on a few of the collection’s lesser known but nonetheless captivating works, which serve as current focus of the collector’s research.
Francesca S. Croce is currently pursuing a doctorate at the University of Vienna, under the supervision of Professor Sebastian Schütze, where she specializes in late Seicento Roman art and art criticism. Her research focuses on the influence of Raphael on seventeenth century biographer Giovan Pietro Bellori and artist Carlo Maratti. She holds a master’s degree in art history from the Courtauld Institute of Art, where she wrote her dissertation “Out of the Darkness: Constructing the Seicento Myth of Annibale Carracci”, and bachelor’s degree in history from Columbia University.
On 6th December, at 6 p.m. Hadas Kedar:
THE ART OF FREE-PORTISM: A DISAPPEARING ACT
Tax-free, offshore storage facilities storing art and other valuables are a thought-provoking phenomenon. It spotlights a small number of wealthy people who are considerably influential, exposing how they are involved and participate (whether consciously or unconsciously) in the “food chain” of the art market.
‘Freeportism’ or ‘Duty-Free Art’ has a bearing on the conceptual aspect of the art field, inviting a renewed look at movements and trends. On the one hand, the artistic object of our present era may be perceived as the protagonist of a world-wide scandal; on the other, it can be regarded as a stimulator for the discussion on the aesthetic and ethical aspects of art, and as a catalyst for discussion of contemporary relations between art and economy.
Hadas Kedar is a cultural entrepreneur and researcher in the field of curatorship and is currently a doctoral candidate at the joint program of the University of Reading and ZHDK. Kedar explores culture in areas distant from dominant cultural centers, focusing on curatorial and artistic acts that deal with colonized cultures in the Negev desert. Kedar founded and curated Arad Art and Architecture residency program and Arad Contemporary Art Center in the south-east Negev desert. She was the editor of EXTREME, an OnCurating issue (2021) dealing with cultures developing from the margins of the globe and the author of South as State of Mind: A Warm Wind from the South in Western Art (2021) in Theory and Criticism (Van Leer Institute). Kedar has been a faculty member of Mandel Center for Leadership in the Negev since 2020.
Monday, 14th June at 6 p.m.
Adelaide Duarte:
Museu Coleção Berardo: The Deviation of a Collector’s Narrative
In today’s globalized world, private collectors have played an increasingly important role in cultural life and their categorization has become more complex. As discussed in Marta Gnyp, The Shift, 2015, leading cosmopolitan collectors dominate the global art system, metaphorically enhance art history, help to create artistic values, exercise patronage and commission new artworks. Sometimes they collect for the public domain (James Stourton, Great Collectors of our Time, 2007), opening private museums or giving their collections to public museums.
The narrative about private collectors has been changing. As collectors turn into iconic figures and cultural models, arguably shaping the taste and the artistic canon, academic and institutional narratives follow these changes. At the same time, we can see the collector interfering with the collection’s narrative and with the image he/she intends to associate with their social role. This is the case with the Berardo Collection.
José Berardo is a Portuguese millionaire mentioned twice on ArtReview Power100, who has assembled a modern and contemporary art collection. This collection, containing an overview of the twentieth century’s most important art movements, is unique in Portugal. Formed with a view to public display, the collection has been known as The Berardo Collection Museum since 2007 (Lisbon), through an agreement with the Portuguese Government, with the collection being lent in exchange for the museum’s opening.
In this presentation, the narrative that has been created around the collection will be analysed, both in academic terms and through the catalogues, as well as in the periodical press, from the collector’s perspective. The purpose is to confront the motives for gathering the artworks, the methods used by the collector, and to relate them to the cultural importance of the collection, emphasizing the controversial image that the collector has in current Portuguese society.
Adelaide DUARTE is an art historian, researcher, and assistant professor at the Institute of Art History, School of Social Sciences and Humanities, Universidade NOVA de Lisboa. She is the Executive Coordinator of the Postgraduate Program “Art Market and Collecting” at Universidade NOVA de Lisboa, since it began in 2016, and also the coordinator of TIAMSA subcommittee Art Market and Collecting in the European Southern Countries and Brazil. Member of the research group “Museum Studies: Art, Museums, and Collections”. She is vice-president of the Friends Association of the Museu Nacional de Arte Contemporânea – Museu do Chiado in Lisbon.
http://ihapgmercado.weebly.com/equipa.html
Monday, 17th May at 6 p.m.
MaryKate Cleary, University of Edinburgh:
‘The Galerie Paul Rosenberg: Transnational Networks and the Market for French Contemporary Art, 1918–1945’
By the start of World War I, art dealer, collector and publisher Paul Rosenberg (1881–1959) had developed a successful business and legendary stock of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century French art. He specialized in Barbizon School, Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, and after 1918, represented the young artists of contemporary Paris, including Marie Laurencin, Pablo Picasso, and Georges Braque. Rosenberg was the first art dealer systematically to expand the lineage of the Great French Masters to encompass the inter-war avant-garde, a strategy that made him one of most financially successful art dealers of the first half of the twentieth century. In the 1920s and 1930s, Rosenberg also built an unparalleled network of networks and dealer collaborations to distribution French art internationally. As a result of the Nazi Occupation of Paris in 1940, however, Rosenberg became one of the most prominent victims of Nazi spoliation in France.
Engaging for the first time unpublished correspondence, transactional records and photographic material from the recently-processed Paul Rosenberg Archives (MoMA, New York), as well as primary-source materials from state archives in France and Germany, this research investigates the critical role played by Rosenberg in the promotion and sale of French art on an international market in the early twentieth century and the impact of the Nazi regime on his practice. Particular attention will be given to (1) Rosenberg’s entrepreneurial strategies, including placing contemporary art in the lineage of French aesthetic identity of previous centuries; (2) transnational dealer networks between Germany, Britain and the United States; (3) Rosenberg’s institutional engagement, especially in the United States and (4) the plunder of Rosenberg’s collection and gallery stock, filling a critical gap in research into mechanisms of spoliation of against Jewish art dealers and collectors in France during the Occupation, and their agency in restitution.
Biography
MaryKate Cleary is an art historian specializing in the art and cultural politics of Germany and France in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with a particular focus on provenance research, history of collecting and cultural property issues in the Nazi Era. She is pursuing a PhD at the University of Edinburgh, where her research focuses on the Galerie Paul Rosenberg and the transnational market for avant-garde art in the inter-war era. MaryKate is an experienced provenance researcher, having worked over the past decade with Holocaust victims and their heirs, as well as museums, toward the resolution of Nazi-era restitution claims. She has been an Adjunct Professor at New York University, where she taught the first academic course dedicated to Provenance Research and a Fulbright Fellow at the Technische Universität Dresden. MaryKate is co-organiser of the interdisciplinary Research Cluster on Collecting and the Art Market at the University of Edinburgh.
Monday, 15th March, 2021 at 6 p.m. London time
Eleni Vassilika will speak on: The Display of Ancient Art in Museums
Encyclopedic museums face different and arguably more complex issues than do those devoted to pictures or, what we in the museum business refer to as, ‘flat art’. We may recall the old overstuffed wooden showcases with archaeological or natural history specimens in serial repetition from our museum school trips. Museums with antiquities and mostly fragmentary objects have a harder time in engaging visitors in their exhibitions of ancient or ethnographic cultures remote in time or place. On a practical level alone, the installation of fragmentary three-dimensional objects, is more complex than hanging pictures in a conventional gallery. The objects are usually placed under glass, and in the old days they might have been pinned to a fabric-covered sloping surface or slant. Now individually mounted on ‘invisible’ Plexiglas plinths, the objects are aesthetically positioned and transformed from specimens to ancient works of art. The shorter and wheelchair-bound visitors should be able to view them easily and the taller and perhaps older exhibition goers should not have to bend or struggle to read a label that is placed too low. Lighting a table case can also be tricky since visitors have to bend over to examine objects, thereby casting an obscuring shadow. Ancient art galleries often involve great weights, like four-ton granite Egyptian sarcophagi that may have to be sited on the ground or lower ground floor distant from the portable antiquities. Many are the considerations in bringing ancient art to life.
Dr Eleni Vassilika was Keeper of Antiquities at the Fitzwilliam Museum of the University of Cambridge (1990-2000), before taking up the Directorship of the Roemer-und Pelizaeus-Museum in Hildesheim Germany (2000-2005), from where she moved on to become Director of the Museo Egizio in Turin Italy (2005-2014). Although considered a specialist in ancient art, she regards herself as a generalist, able to address a wide spectrum of the arts. Her directorial management skills were honed through the challenging and possibly unparalleled experience of presiding over the successful privatisation of both continental museums. Eleni returned to the UK in 2014 as Curatorial Director of the National Trust, responsible for historic properties. Since 2016 she has devoted her time to research, writing lecturing and organising exhibitions.
Monday, 15th February
David Bellingham will speak on: Collecting and Display in Ancient Rome
This paper will begin with a critical review of the primary source types available for the study of the collecting and display of art in the ancient Roman world. The main sources include: literary histories, biographies, legal speeches, rhetorical exercises, poems and private letters; as well as archaeological sources such as the towns and villas destroyed by the Vesuvian eruption of 79 CE, and other excavated sites in and around Rome itself and throughout the Roman Empire.
The paper will then look in more detail at three case studies: the Roman Republican statesman Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 BCE), the excavations of the ‘Villa of the Papyri’ at Herculaneum and the palatial villa at Tivoli of the Roman Emperor Hadrian (76-138 CE). The evidence for Cicero’s collecting and display rationales only survives in literary sources, including his political tracts and speeches, lawcourt speeches, philosophical essays and, perhaps most interestingly, his published ‘private’ correspondence with family and friends. The case study will focus on Cicero’s letters to Titus Pomponius Atticus (c. 110-32 BCE), his friend, art advisor and agent working out of Athens and providing Cicero with sculptures for display in his several Italian villas. The letters challenge the commonly held modern opinion that Romans collected art with little regard for rational selection and display. The ‘Villa of the Papyri’ at Herculaneum was partially excavated in the eighteenth century and the findspots of its famous sculptural collection were faithfully recorded before they were transported to Naples. The knowledge of the original locations of the sculptures, together with the Ciceronian correspondence with Atticus enable an assessment of Roman attitudes towards collection and display. These assessments can be applied to many other display contexts, including the replication of ‘old master’ (earlier Classical Greek) paintings in Romano-Campanian interior decoration, the marble replication of Polykleitos’s bronze Doryphoros (‘Spear-bearer’) in the ‘Samnite Gymnasium’ at Pompeii and the sculptural replications of Classical sculptures in Hadrian’s villa at Tivoli. Finally, the paper will argue that these ancient Roman collecting strategies as transmitted in the textual tradition might have influenced those of the Renaissance.
Biography
Dr. David Bellingham is an art historian, author and Programme Director for the Master’s Degree in Art Business at Sotheby’s Institute of Art, London where he leads a core unit on The International Art World, Law and Ethics, as well as electives on The Market for Antiquities & Old Masters and Ethics, Law & the Art Trade. He also lectures on Classical Art and Architecture, and their reception in the modern era. He holds a special honours degree in Latin and Classical Archaeology (University of Birmingham), and a doctorate from the University of Manchester for his thesis on the cultural and socio-economic aspects of sympotic scenes in ancient Roman and Pompeian wall-painting. David has published numerous books and articles on a variety of subjects, including: art fairs; art business ethics; Greek & Celtic mythology; the art market for classical sculpture and frescoes; the paintings of Sandro Botticelli; authenticity issues in the paintings of Frans Hals; and the ethical reception of the Riace Bronzes.
Monday, 18th January
Laura Canella will speak on: Charles Henfrey (1818-1891) collector
This paper explores the story of an English engineer and art collector, who lived between England, Italy and India, working on different railway projects on the behalf of the English crown. He was the owner of a collection of Renaissance artworks of considerable importance, which included paintings of Italian artists such as Moretto, Titian and Bergognone. Upon his arrival in Italy, Henfrey established his home in Baveno, on Lake Maggiore, where he built his villa in typical English neo-gothic style. Villa Clara-Henfrey soon became a social and cultural gathering point of the nobility and the rich Piedmontese and Italian bourgeoisie. However, the most important guest was undoubtedly Queen Victoria, who spent a month as a guest with her daughter.
Baveno’s villa became the location of Charles Henfrey’s collection of Renaissance paintings, part of which have afterwards joined the collection of the National Gallery in London. Therefore, in addition to highlighting the figure of a long-neglected collector, the research gives an insight of the cultural tastes and choices of the wider panorama of art lovers and connoisseurs of the Nineteenth century. Furthermore, it adds fundamental new information to the collecting history of important paintings of Italian Renaissance.
Laura Canella has just graduated with a Master’s degree in Arts and Cultural Management at King’s College London. Previously, she obtained a Bachelor’s degree (First Class Honours) in History and Preservation of Cultural Heritage, followed by a Master’s degree (First Class Honours) in Art History at the Statale University in Milan. During her studies in Italy, she graduated with a thesis regarding the English engineer and collector Charles Henfrey (1818-1891), supervised by Professor Giovanni Agosti. In March 2017 she held a lecture on the subject at the Bagatti Valsecchi Museum in Milan, as part of the cycle of meetings “New Voices, young art historians of the University of Milan”. She collaborated with the editorial staff of “Concorso. Arti e Lettere”, magazine of the Department of Art History of the Statale University of Milan, publishing two dossiers for which she was curator, 1667 Malvasia in Milan, and author, Charles Henfrey a collector between Baveno and India.
2020
Monday, 14th December
Dr Joanna Smalcerz will speak on
The Anatomy of Wrongdoing: Socio-Psychological Dynamics of Unlawful Art Collecting
In 1776, Charles Townley (1737-1805), an English collector of antiquities, Grand Tourist and future trustee of the British Museum, received a letter from his agent in Italy, Gavin Hamilton (1723-1798), in which the famous dealer wrote explicitly about the smuggling that would be necessary for the transport of a statue of Venus out of the Papal States. A year earlier, equally openly, the two discussed the bribes necessary to smuggle out another antique statue. Similarly, more than a century later, the Berlin curator Wilhelm Bode (1845-1929) and a collector from Bode’s circle, Adolf von Beckerath (1834-1915), would collude with the Florentine art dealer, Stefano Bardini (1836-1922) for the illicit export of artworks from the Kingdom of Italy. Within these cliques, unlawful collecting was perceived as necessary in the race against international collectors to secure the most valuable available antiquities and Italian Renaissance works of art. In the nineteenth century the phenomenon was widespread – the same normalisation of law-breaking permeated other collectors’ circles, for instance that of Bernard (1865-1959) and Mary Berenson (1864-1945), and Isabella Stewart Gardner (1840-1924).
Drawing both on the nineteenth-century examples from her recent monograph, Smuggling the Renaissance: The Illicit Export of Artworks Out of Italy, 1861-1909 (February 2020) and on more recent cases of illegal art collecting, the paper analyses the social and psychological dynamics of unlawful collecting of art and antiquities. The paper investigates the illicit schemes of museum curators from the perspective of studies on white-collar crime and deploys concepts stemming from criminology, such as techniques of neutralisation, to explain the social acceptance of wrongdoing within the networks of private collectors engaged in art smuggling. The speaker will reveal the opaque, yet universal phenomena, governing art collecting.
Joanna Smalcerz is an Associate Researcher at the University of Bern. Her research and publications focus on the nineteenth-century art market and collecting, and investigate the relations between societies and their cultural heritage. Her recent book, Smuggling the Renaissance: The Illicit Export of Artworks Out of Italy, 1861-1909 explores the phenomenon of art spoliation in Italy following Unification, when the international demand for Italian Renaissance art was at an all-time high but effective art protection legislation had not yet been passed. Joanna holds MAs from the University of Warsaw and the Free University Berlin, and a PhD from the University of Bern. She worked on the Project for the Study of Collecting and Provenance at the Getty Research Institute and lectured at the University of Bern. Her awards include fellowships from the Bibliotheca Hertziana – Max Planck Institute for Art History in Rome and the Villa I Tatti – The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies in Florence.
Monday, 9th November
Harriet O’Neill will speak on
Lending and Borrowing: The British Fine Arts Palace at the 1911 International Arts Exhibition, Rome
In 1911, in response to an invitation from the Italian government, the wealthier amongst the European nations opened pavilions in the Valle Giulia, Rome displaying ‘…representative collections of pictures, sculpture, drawings and engravings’ to celebrate 50 years of a unified Italy with Rome as its capital. This paper will explore collecting and display in terms of the loans negotiated from a diverse group of lenders for the British contribution to the International Fine Arts Exhibition and their curation.
Under the aegis of the Exhibitions Branch of the Board of Trade, 1232 paintings, sculptures, watercolours, prints and drawings were borrowed, catalogued and transported from the United Kingdom to Rome. Highlights included works by Leighton, Hogarth, Reynolds, Zoffany, Rossetti, Gainsborough and Constable. What was displayed was determined by a Committee, the President of which was the British Ambassador to Italy, Sir James Rennell Rodd and the Chairman was Thomas Ashby, Director of the British School at Rome. The works exhibited came from countrywide stakeholders of all social and institutional levels, including Lord O’Hagan of County Tyrone, Staffordshire General Infirmary, the Corporation of Leeds, the Fishmongers Company and the Corporation of Leicester to name but a few. To date there has been no scholarship on what motivated owners to lend nor why the Committee asked them to, lacunae this paper seeks to correct.
By focusing on the creation of a hitherto little researched temporary collection and its display, understanding of transient collecting will be heightened and what it reveals about national collecting practices at the beginning of the twentieth century. It should be noted that many of these works of art are now in national and international collections and that this discussion will provide a new understanding of their past lives.
Biography
Dr Harriet O’Neill undertook her BA in History at the University of Oxford and holds MAs in History of Art and Art Museum and Gallery Studies. Her PhD, ‘Reframing the Italian Renaissance at the National Gallery’ was a collaboration between UCL and the National Gallery, London. She has held curatorial positions at the National Gallery and Royal Holloway, University of London and published articles on frames and framing, scenography and nineteenth-century ornament. Harriet is currently Assistant Director for the Humanities and Social Sciences at the British School at Rome and an Honorary Research Associate of Royal Holloway.
Monday, 12th October
Pamela Bianchi will speak on
Dressing Up Spaces: Exhibition Design and Display Strategies at The Gonzaga Court
The Galerieta verso la Mostra (the gallery of marbles or months), the Galeria Grande (the main gallery built around 1592 to exhibit modern paintings), the Coridore che guarda verso la Santa Barbara (a corridor connecting two sections of the building, serving as storage for paintings and sculptures), the Logion Serato (a gallery of mirrors, central point of the exhibition structure), the Passetto davanti al Camarino della Grotta (the passage in front of the Grotto) and the Stanza contigua alla Libreria (the room adjoining to the library).
In 1626, these rooms appeared in the inventory of the ducal palace of the Gonzaga family in Mantua, drawn up by Ferdinando Gonzaga. These spaces (named in relation to the typology of objects contained and the topology of the other rooms) not only served to exhibit the family collections of antiquities and paintings but also translated the (ante litteram) “museographic” programme conceived by Ferdinando. At the time, the palace was perceived as the architectural portrait of the family, thus, a succession of spaces was especially “dressed up” to show off its intellectual and social power. Within such a scenographic apparatus, visits were not limited to a single room but developed in a specific dynamic extending temporality and spatiality. Here, visitors were allowed to experience the palace through “the eyes that saw, the head that turned and the legs that walked” (Le Corbusier, 1950).
This contribution studies the relationship between the architecture of the palace and the display of the collection, to generate a broader debate around the role played by ancient collections in the design of the first exhibition strategies and related spaces, born before the idea of a fully public museum. By detailing the stages of a sort of architectural walk, this study thus probes the aesthetic and spatial experience of the visitor inside the ducal palace of Mantua, in which the relationship between the display of collections, furniture design and architectural decoration, created a veritable “exhibiting machine”.
Finally, this paper will offer an opportunity to hypothesize a new form of a historiographical reading of the spaces of collections in the 16th and 17th centuries, with regard to contemporary museographic vocabulary, spatial design and exhibiting methods.
Pamela Bianchi is an art historian (Milan, 2011), and was awarded a PhD in Aesthetics, Sciences and Technologies of Arts at Paris 8 University (2015). Since 2013, she has been an affiliated to the AI-AC research team there. She recently organized the international conference “DEA Allestimento/Exhibition Design” at the Paris 8 University and the School of Architecture ENSA Paris-Malaquais. Her research interests include the history of exhibition space, exhibition theories, architectural design, museum studies and new curating approaches. She has published widely, including: Espaces de l’œuvre, espaces de l’exposition. De nouvelles formes d’expérience dans l’art contemporain (Paris: Connaissances et Savoirs, 2016) and she is currently preparing for publication The Spactio Picto. The Imagery of the Exhibition Space in the Early Modern Period (1450-1750).
Monday, 9th March
Jane Milosch and Nick Pearce
Collecting and Provenance: A Multidisciplinary Approach
Provenance – tracking the origin, ownership, transfer, and movement of objects – has become somewhat more visible in recent years, spurred on by the restitution of Nazi spoliated artworks and lately human remains and cultural heritage translocated during the colonial era. But rich provenance data is relevant within a wider a range of contexts and for a plurality of audiences where there is a desire to connect with objects, histories, cultures and associated people of all kinds. Through the work of the Smithsonian Provenance Research Initiative Jane Milosch and Nick Pearce have been engaging with provenance from this broad range of perspectives which has resulted in a new book: Collecting and Provenance: A Multidisciplinary Approach, the aim of which is to present provenance as an integral part of collecting history, illuminating the social, economic, and historic contexts in which objects were created and collected. They argue that provenance relates to the history of people as well as objects and its study can reveal an often-intricate network of relationships, patterns of activity, and motivations across a range of disciplinary perspectives.
Nick Pearce holds the Richmond Chair of Fine Art at the University of Glasgow, where he specializes in the arts of China. He joined the University of Glasgow in 1998 where he has held the positions of Head of History of Art and Head of the School of Culture and Creative Arts and is currently a Smithsonian Research Associate. His research interests include photographers and photography in late nineteenth-century China and aspects of the collecting of Chinese art in the West during the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries. His most recent publications include: “From the Summer Palace 1860: Provenance and Politics,” in L. Tythacott (ed.), Collecting and Displaying China’s “Summer Palace” in the West: The Yuanmingyuan in Britain and France (2018).
Jane C. Milosch, Director of the Provenance Research Exchange Program (PREP) at the Smithsonian Institution, is the founder and former director of the Smithsonian Provenance Research Initiative, where she oversaw WWII–era provenance research projects and advised on international cultural heritage projects, provenance, and training programmes. In 2014, Milosch was appointed the US representative to Germany’s International “Schwabing Art Trove” Task Force Advisory Group. Milosch is currently an honorary professor in the School of Culture and Creative Arts, University of Glasgow.
Monday, 10th February
Alycen Mitchell, Queen Mary, University of London
Pioneering New York Art Dealers and the Genesis of the American Auction Style
This paper focuses on the 19th century genesis of the American art and antiques auction to examine the origin of its defining characteristics, proposing that American art and antiques auctions were upmarket retail-oriented events. In this paper Alycen Mitchell discusses the marketing techniques used in the latter part of the 19th century by the pioneering traders who transformed New York into America’s art and antiques auction capital. These techniques came to shape the American image of the art and antiques auction and had lasting and powerful resonance. In the latter 20th century, Sotheby’s and Christie’s cultivated this image to their advantage in their rise to international pre-eminence.
Alycen Mitchell recently completed a PhD at Queen Mary, University of London. Her thesis charts Sotheby’s and Christie’s rise to international market pre-eminence following World War II. She originally worked in the antiques business and has a track record of writing about art and design. Her research (co-authored with Barbara Pezzini) on the relationship between George Romney’s critical reputation and the art market was published in The Burlington Magazine (July 2015). She spoke at the Creating Market, Collecting Art Conference (July 2016) organised by Christie’s Education in London. Most recently she presented a paper entitled ‘The Weinberg Auction: A Dress Rehearsal for Sotheby’s Retail Debut’ at the Researching Art Market Practices from Past to Present and Tools for the Future Workshop (November 2019) at Accademia Nazionale di San Luca in Rome.
Monday, 13th January
Peter Humfrey
The Orléans Collection reborn in Regency London: the Stafford Gallery at Cleveland House
During the 24 years of its existence (1806-1830) the Stafford Gallery was celebrated as the most important collection of continental Old Master paintings in London. The author’s recent book discusses the way in which the collection was formed in the 1790s by the 3rd Duke of Bridgewater and his nephew the (future) 2nd Marquess of Stafford, and also the way in which it was displayed, both in the Stafford Gallery itself and in its early Victorian successors, the Bridgewater and the Sutherland Galleries. The present talk will concentrate on the large group of Italian paintings acquired in 1798/99 from the former Orléans collection at the Palais-Royal in Paris, and how their presence in their new home of Cleveland House was highlighted, both in the hang and in published guides and catalogues.
Peter Humfrey is Emeritus Professor of Art History at the University of St Andrews, where he taught from 1977 until his retirement in 2012. He is the author of numerous publications on Italian art, including monographs on Cima da Conegliano (1983) and Titian (2007), and the catalogue Glasgow Museums: The Italian Paintings (2012). He has served on the committees of several major international loan exhibitions, and is currently Guest Curator of the exhibition on Vittore Carpaccio to take place in Venice and Washington in 2020-21. His recent book on the Stafford Gallery developed from his involvement with the exhibition The Age of Titian: Venetian Renaissance Art from Scottish Collections held at the National Gallery of Scotland in 2004.
2019
Monday, 2nd December
Arthur MacGregor
The India Museum Revisited: the East India Company and its Collections
In its day the India Museum formed the most important collection of oriental material in London. Far from being a celebration of Empire, the collections were conceived with utilitarian and scientific aims, with a view to consolidating the Company’s mercantile supremacy, though in time the character of the collections came also to reflect the political and military gains by the Company’s armies in India. From its original home at the East India Company’s headquarters in Leadenhall Street, the museum collection moved to Whitehall and ultimately to South Kensington, before finally being dispersed in 1879. These developments, and current attempts to recover something of the changing experience offered by the museum, will be reviewed.
Arthur MacGregor is currently an Andrew W. Mellon Visiting Professor in the V&A’s Research Department. Following the publication last year of his book Company Curiosities, he is working on an analysis and reconstruction of the contents of the East India Company’s museum. Formerly a curator at the Ashmolean Museum, he continues to edit the Journal of the History of Collections.
Monday, 4th November
Shirley M. Mueller, M.D.
Inside the Head of a Collector: Neurobiological Forces at Work
Collecting objects gives enormous pleasure to approximately one third of the population, providing such benefits as intellectual stimulation, the thrill of the chase, and leaving a legacy. On the other hand, the same pursuit can engender pain; for example, paying too much for an object, unknowingly buying a fake, or dealing with the frustrations of collection dispersal. Until recently, there was no objective way to enhance the positive (pleasure) aspects of collecting and minimize the negative (pain).
Now, for the first time, scientific research in neuro- and behavioral economics gives us a way to turn this around. Neuroeconomics is the study of the biological foundation of economic thought, while behavioral economics incorporates insights from psychology and other social sciences into the examination of monetary behavior. By using examples from these disciplines, Shirley M. Mueller, MD, relates her own experiences as a serious collector and as a neuroscientist to examine different behavioral traits which characterize collectors. Her information is relevant not only for those who collect, but also for colleges and universities which teach collection management plus museum staff who interact with collectors as well as dealers of objects desired by collectors.
Shirley M. Mueller is an internationally known collector and scholar of Chinese export porcelain, as well as a physician board-certified in Neurology and Psychiatry. This latter expertise led her to explore her own intentions and emotions while collecting art, which, she discovered, are applicable to all collectors. This new understanding was the motivation for her recent publication: Inside the Head of a Collector: Neurobiological Forces at Work.
Mueller not only lectures and publishes about the neuropsychology of the collector; she also was guest curator for “Elegance from the East: New Insights into Old Porcelain” at the Indianapolis Museum of Art (now Newfields) in 2017. In this unique exhibit, she combined export porcelain with concepts from neuroscience to make historical objects personally relevant to visitors.
Monday, 7th October
Andrea M. Gáldy
Politics of Culture: Collecting and Display at the Court of (Grand) Duke Cosimo I de‘ Medici
In 2019, the 500th birthday of Cosimo I de‘ Medici is being celebrated. Born in 1519 to Giovanni de‘ Medici and Maria Salviati, i.e. a Medici on both sides, he continued the successful tradition of Medici collecting and the use of possessions on the political stage. Nonetheless, his collections played a Cinderella role until the 1980s, when his importance slowly started to be acknowledged. As the ruler over (grand) ducal Florence and Tuscany and married to a pious Spanish bride, he was still mostly regarded as a tyrant whose collecting activities emulated those of his republican ancestors.
Research over several decades has been able to show that Cosimo’s collections were not only considerable and varied, they were also a matter of great personal interest to their owner. Displayed in especially set-up halls and study rooms, not to mention the construction of the Uffizi from 1560, Medici collecting remained an important part of cultural politics in ducal Florence and would remain so in grand ducal Tuscany. In fact, the collections of Cosimo and his sons, Francesco and Ferdinando, are regarded as leading trend setters, as were those of Cosimo il Vecchio and Lorenzo il Magnifico. What has not yet been emphasised sufficiently is the fact that in the sixteenth century the collections contributed to a politics of power and culture, in particular in the relationship between Italian states, including papal Rome, and in connection with the Holy Roman Empire.
The paper will therefore trace the history of the collections, as well as show their importance in the political negotiations between Florence and the rest of Europe.
Andrea M. Gáldy is a specialist in the History of Collecting. Originally trained as a classical archaeologist, she gained a PhD at the School for Art History and Archaeology at the University of Manchester with a thesis on the collection of antiquities of Cosimo I de’ Medici. Since completing her doctorate, she has received post-doc fellowships from the Henry Moore Foundation and from Villa I Tatti. Her research focuses on collections, their patrons and their purposes. She is a founding member of the international forum Collecting and Display, which runs regular events in partnership with the IHR, London, and other institutions worldwide. Andrea is the main editor of the series Collecting Histories (CSP), under which label six C&D conference volumes have been published so far.
June: The Afterlife of the Paston Treasure Exhibition
Andrew Moore and Francesca Vanke together with a distinguished panel of scholars will discuss some of the issues raised by the important exhibition The Paston Treasure: Microcosm of the Known World, held at the Yale Centre in New Haven and subsequently at the Norwich Castle Museum & Art Gallery, which focused on this extraordinary painting. The exhibition brought together works of art illustrated in the painting along with material related to the cultural and intellectual world of Sir William Paston, first Baronet (1610-1663) and his son Robert, first Earl of Yarmouth (1631-1683). Dr. Andrew Moore, former Keeper of Art and Senior Curator at Norwich Castle and Dr. Francesca Vanke, Chief Curator and Keeper of Fine and Decorative Art, will open the discussion with their reflections on issues which emerged from the exhibition and questions still remaining.
Professor John Heilbron, Professor of History and Vice-Chancellor Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley and senior research fellow at Worcester College, Oxford, will consider the question of the scientific aspects of the painting and the fascination that science and alchemy held for both William and Robert Paston in the context of his forthcoming book on the scientific circles in seventeenth-century England, Why is Galileo in this Painting? Dr. Simon Mills, Teaching Fellow in British and European History 1500-1800 at Newcastle University, has a specialist interest in British travellers to the Ottoman Empire and will consider the travels of William Paston to Egypt and Jerusalem in the context of British travellers of the period. The sumptuous works of art in the painting form the third topic for discussion with Dr. David M. Mitchell, author of many books on silver and goldsmiths’ work, including Silversmiths in Elizabethan and Stuart London, with a focus on British collectors of silver in the 17th century, as well as trade and contacts with the Netherlands. The session will be chaired by Adriana Turpin, currently Head of Research, IESA, Paris, who will contribute on the subject of visitors to the Medici Tribuna in Florence.
Monday, 13th May
Donato Esposito
Two artist collectors: Sir Joshua Reynolds and Lord Leighton
Joshua Reynolds (1723–1792) and Frederic Leighton (1830–1896) were arguably the two greatest former Presidents of the Royal Academy of Arts, London. Less well known is that both were avid art collectors. Their collections, though formed a century apart, shared much in common and both functioned as an extension to their activities as head of the Royal Academy. The contrasting motives for the formation and display of these two artists’ collections will be explored and highlighted in the context of the foundation and expansion of public collections in the nineteenth century.
Reynolds figured in Leighton’s art collection both as illustrious practitioner and cherished former owner. Though both collections have been broken up and widely dispersed around the world, reconstructing these presidential collections will expose the overlapping private and public facets of these two deeply influential artists.
Donato Esposito is an independent academic and curator specialising in British art, collecting and taste from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. His first book was published in 2017, Frederick Walker and the Idyllist. He has recently contributed to publications accompanying exhibitions on William Powell Frith in Harrogate (2019) and James Tissot in San Francisco and Paris (2019–20).
Monday, 4th March
Annette Cremer
The life and work of Augusta Dorothee (1666‐1751), Princess of Brunswick, who married the protestant Graf Anton‐Günther II of Schwarzburg/Thuringia, has been ignored so far by historiography as well as art history. Becoming a childless widow in 1716, she spent the remaining 35 years of her life at Schloss Augustenburg, surrounding herself with a large courtly household. During this time, she intensely focused on building and commissioning a “doll city”, which she used to call “Mon Plaisir”, including 2000 items and 400 figurines.
Auguste Dorothee’s collection is an unusual example of female representation and negotiation of power and authority within her dynasty, the agnate family and also local subordinates. The miniature world mirrors life at her court and partly at the residency of Arnstadt, including the bourgeoisie as well as crafts and the religious life of the time. It is to be understood as an expression of her claim to power as former sovereign of the principality. As result of her niece Elisabeth Christine becoming the wife of Emperor Karl VI Habsburg, Auguste Dorothee converted to Catholicism. But neither her close relationship to the Kaiser nor her father, Duke Anton Ulrich of Wolfenbüttel, helped her during the lengthy conflict with her late husband’s heir concerning her financial support.
The collection of dolls, as part of a bigger cabinet of curiosities, as well as a porcelain‐cabinet and her ambition as entrepreneur, show her as absolute ruler in concordance with virtues explained in tract literature. Auguste Dorothee deliberately used the Wunderkammer as a medium of male representation for her own statement. As most parts of the collection were handcrafted by the princess and her court and regional craftspeople, it can also be seen as an uncommon means of keeping contact with subordinates while displaying superiority at the same time.
In the paper she will argue that Auguste Dorothee used the traditional female occupation of needlework and turned it from a virtuous occupation into a strategy to represent her power. Thus Auguste Dorothee tried to enlarge the social space appointed to her. The dollhouse interiors show her as powerful ruler over her own territory, although in reality she was unimportant and powerless.
Dr. phil. Annette C. Cremer MA (Art History & English Literature) teaches cultural history at the Justus-Liebig-University Giessen, Germany. Her main research interests are in the fields of early modern material culture and in the history of kunstkammer-collections. Her monograph on the dollhouse collection of Duchess Auguste Dorothea of Schwarzburg (1666-1751) was published in 2015. Together with other colleagues, she has edited three sets of conference proceedings on Objects as Sources of Cultural History (Objekte als Quellen der historischen Kulturwissenschaften, Wien/Köln/Weimar 2017), on Prince and Princess as Artists (Fürst und Fürstin als Künstler, Berlin 2018) and on Travelling Princesses (Prinzessin unterwegs. Reisen fürstlicher Frauen in der Frühen Neuzeit, Berlin 2017). Visiting Fellow History Faculty, Cambridge 2018/19
Monday, 4th February
Elsje van Kessel
Ships, Inventories, and Asian Goods in Europe c. 1600
This paper asks what knowledge of early modern ships and their cargoes can contribute to the history of collecting. In what sense can we describe a ship laden with objects as a collection, and what are the possible benefits of such an approach?
These questions derive from van Kessel’s project Stolen Ships and Globalisation: Asian Material Culture in Europe c. 1600. The period around 1600 was a tipping point in the history of early modern globalisation: the Portuguese empire reached its zenith around this time, and the Dutch Republic and England were just beginning to take over Portuguese-Asian sea routes and trading posts. The project studies the successes and failures of early modern globalisation against this background through a focus on art objects and their interaction with human beings and ideas. Central to the research are the analysis of the seizures of Portuguese cargo ships by the English and the Dutch and the aftermath of these events. The project reconstructs the cargoes of these ships and responses they evoked.
This paper will look in particular at a range of textual sources from the archive, such as bills of lading and inventories of stolen goods. These record the types of objects on board: apart from spices, Chinese, Japanese and Indian (art) objects like precious stones, jewellery, silks, porcelain, lacquer, and furniture. As this paper will show, they also shed light on the ways people and objects related, and how the meanings of objects changed in the course of their trajectories. While the journeys of objects at sea usually remain an implicit assumption, an essential yet unstudied phase in the life of a collectible, here they take centre stage.
Elsje van Kessel is Senior Lecturer in Art History at the University of St Andrews. She holds a PhD from Leiden University, and is the author of The Lives of Paintings: Presence, Agency and Likeness in Venetian Art of the Sixteenth-Century (De Gruyter, 2017). She has received numerous fellowships, grants and awards: among others, an annual stipend at the Centre Allemand d’Histoire de l’Art, grants from the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation and Museum and the Leverhulme Trust. Elsje’s research is broadly concerned with the viewing, use and display of early modern art. In her monograph The Lives of Paintings, she examines how and why people in Titian’s Venice treated certain paintings and other works of art as living beings.
Elsje’s current major research project is ‘Stolen Ships and Globalisation: Asian Material Culture in Europe c. 1600’. Recently awarded a Leverhulme Research Fellowship, the project aims to study the circulation of Asian art objects between Portugal, England and Holland at the turn of the seventeenth century, in particular as a result of piracy and privateering.
Monday, 7th January
Imogen Tedbury
‘To mould a great museum collection’: Robert Langton Douglas (1864-1951) and the transatlantic art trade
Robert Langton Douglas is sometimes considered an idiosyncratic dealer, perhaps owing to his colourful and multi-faceted career as, variously, chaplain for the Church of England in Italy, scholar of Renaissance art, captain in the war office during WW1, agent for the Metropolitan Museum of Art (1909-1920) and Director of the National Gallery of Ireland (1916-1923). He began to deal in Sienese painting, the field which he fondly called his ‘own school’, before purposefully expanding his expertise to encompass a broad range of Old Master paintings, drawings, sculpture and decorative arts. He had long cherished an ambition to be a museum director, and saw the role as one of ‘moulding’ or ‘shaping’ great collections. Yet later in his career, he argued that dealers could also shape collections as they were empowered by the choice of which institutions to approach and thus responsible for their stock’s resting place.
Utilising unpublished archival resources and drawing on the physical examination of paintings that passed through his hands, this paper re-examines the strategies used by this key but neglected dealer. As an agent he took as little as 5% or expenses in acquiring works for his museum clients. He sometimes gifted smaller artworks to museums, to cultivate relationships and seal transactions. Douglas also worked closely with his own restorer to present paintings as ‘untouched’ treasures from ‘sunk’ British collections, an ironic but shrewd response to market demands. As the history of collecting, display and restoration intersect, it is hoped that this case study will stimulate discussion around the roles that dealers can play in ‘moulding’ or ‘shaping’ museum collections, as well as their lasting impact on artworks’ physical histories.
Imogen Tedbury is an art historian interested in the longer lives of artworks, from the time of their making to their more recent histories. Her research explores the intersections between the history of taste and the physical history of art, with a special focus on medieval and Renaissance art in the long nineteenth century. The scholar-dealer Robert Langton Douglas forms a special subject of her research. She received her AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Award PhD from the Courtauld Institute of Art and the National Gallery. This project explored the collecting, reception and display of early Sienese painting in Britain. She has received grants from the Getty Research Institute, the ICMA and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, where she was a J. Clawson Mills Fellow in the Robert Lehman Collection. She is the Assistant Curator of the Picture Gallery and Art Collections at Royal Holloway, University of London.
2018
Tuesday, 11th December
Collecting Histories Forum: New Research from Emerging Scholars
For the final session of the Collecting and Display seminars in 2018, we are collaborating with the Society for the History of Collecting to present new research by three members. Each will give a short paper so that there will be time for questions and discussion. We are most grateful for the support for this event provided by the Worshipful Company of Playing Card Makers.
Guido Beduschi, PhD candidate, Corpus Christi College, University of Cambridge:
Collecting Sources: Antonio Francesco Ghiselli (1634-1730) and his Memorie Manoscritte
Antonio Francesco Ghiselli left 88 volumes of manuscript memoires to posterity: the Memorie Antiche Manoscritte di Bologna. The Memorie’s volumes of modern history, concerning events contemporary with Ghiselli’s life, are rich in manuscript and printed ephemera as well as other material (such as leaflets, newssheets, edicts, popular prints and engravings), which were collected by the author and glued into the pages of his book – and which would have, otherwise, hardly survived. In this talk, Guido Beduschi will look at some of this rare material, at how and why they were collected by Ghiselli, and the function they had in his historical work. Finally, he will consider the collectable value of Ghiselli’s memoirs themselves in the manuscript book market, during the earlier part of the eighteenth century.
Giuseppe Rizzo, Ph.D student Karl-Ruppert, Heidelberg University
Icons of Renaissance Taste in Vulcan’s Foundry. Plaster and Bronze Casts from Florence to England (1830-1860)
In the first half of the nineteenth century reproductions of the some of the most representative statues of fifteenth and sixteenth century ‘Renaissance’ art came to England from Florence. They soon became icons in the new Victorian taste. How, when and why did copies of statues of ‘the Renaissance’ come to England? What was the process through which they became so influential? To answer these questions, the talk examines the interaction between the production of statuary copies in the artist workshops of Florence and the collecting interests of wealthy British “grand tourists”. It studies the gradual evolution of taste towards Italian Renaissance art and the effects of defining its visual images within and outside Tuscany after the 1830s. This interaction is exemplified by the patronage of the 2nd Duke and Duchess of Sutherland, who, through their wealth and closeness to Queen Victoria, were influential representatives of the British aristocracy.
Nayra Zaghloul, Worcester College, University of Oxford
The Ouseley Manuscripts: a History
This talk will present a biographical outline of Sir Gore and Sir William Ouseley’s lives and their academic specialisations in order to stimulate discussion on how‘qualified’ they were to valuate, collect and write about Islamic manuscripts on the scale they did. It will compare the contents and structure of the Ouseley manuscript collection to other nineteenth century private and public collections and discuss its current position within the wider collection of the Bodleian Library’s Islamic holdings. Nayra will trace the journey the brothers took through Iran on their joint diplomatic tour with mention of the Persian manuscripts acquired on their travels in India. It will present, in greater codicological detail, a selection of the manuscripts to identify links between the Ouseley’s scholarly interests and the items in their collections and to show key features that characterise a manuscript once owned by the brothers, such as, signatures, coats of arms, typical bindings and other signs of previous ownership or sale. These narratives will shed light on the nature of ‘Oriental’ manuscript collecting in nineteenth century England.
Nayra Zaghloul is a postgraduate student in Islamic Art and Archaeology at the Khalili Research Centre, University of Oxford funded by the Barakat Trust. Her research interests include the history of collecting, Persian and Arabic manuscripts, cosmopolitanism, photography, jewellery, Arab painting in the 20th century and Middle Eastern literature. She is based between London, Oxford and Cairo and works as a freelance cataloguer and collection adviser for private collectors, museums, galleries and dealers across the world. She can be reached at nayra.zaghloul@gmail.com or you can follow her work at http://www.instagram.com/nayrazag/
Tuesday, 13th November
Cecilia Riva
Austen Henry Layard, the achievement of “a collector of various things”
This talk challenges the historical assessment of the Layard Collection as simply a bequest of paintings to the National Gallery. The paper will shed light on the multifarious interests of Austen Henry Layard (Paris, 1817 – London, 1894) in forming a collection consisting of more than 800 items. These ranged from notable Italian Renaissance paintings to beautiful examples of Armenian manuscripts; from Spanish religious metalwork to Burgundian tapestry. As a result, the Layard collection was deemed to be one of the most important in Venice in the late XIX century. The history of its formation, display, and subsequent dispersal has many interesting aspects that still have not been precisely traced.
Taken in its entirety, the collection reveals an exquisite cameo of its creator, and shows the way in which Layard sought to attain personal status and prestige through the development of his collection. Though not all his purchases were of high quality, they furnish a remarkable example of the way in which such a collection could be perceived and the role it played in the last decades of the XIX century, both in England and Italy. To this end, the paper will present new and evocative insights into the interiors of Ca’ Capello Layard where the collection was lodged and displayed, through analysing and integrating both new and previously overlooked documentary sources.
The collection should be assessed not only as a dialectical interaction between spaces, objects and artworks, but should primarily be viewed as a narrative formed by its creator. From this perspective, the Layard collection furnishes an interesting case study even when dispersed and displaced.
Cecilia holds a M.S. in Economics and Management of Arts and Cultural Activities from Ca’ Foscari University Venice and she is currently a doctoral candidate in History of Arts. Her Ph.D. is funded by Ca’ Foscari University, Venice and supervised by Prof. Martina Frank, Guido Zucconi and Emanuele Pellegrini. Her forthcoming dissertation is titled “Austen Henry Layard, as an art collector and amateur”.
Monday, 2nd October
Natasha Shoory
A New Collector of the Ancien Régime: Madame de Saint-Sauveur
As the Enlightenment questioned crucial issues such as the established political, religious, and social foundations of society, debates and transformations regarding art, luxury and taste emerged alongside key shifts in the history of patronage and collecting. The development of the secondary market and the modern auction, the decline of royal patronage following the death of Louis XIV, the emergence of financiers as collectors, and the growth in the number of collectors and collections, brought changes to who was collecting, what they acquired, and how they acquired objects. The quantity of collections during the latter half of the eighteenth century, combined with the relatively few scholarly explorations of those collections (particularly in the case of female collectors), provide the historian of collecting with a wealth of undiscovered and untouched information.
In Paris on 12th February 1776 an anonymous sale of a collection of paintings primarily of the French and Northern schools, as well as drawings, engravings and bronzes amongst other objects, took place conducted by Pierre Rémy. Some of these works were then acquired by major collectors, such as Randon de Boisset, and have appeared regularly on the art market and in public museum collections up to the present day. The unannotated catalogue omitted an introduction and listed the identity of the collector only as ‘Madame’. However, two separate versions of the catalogue were inscribed with the name ‘Madame de Saint-Sauveur’, an unlikely mistake to be made twice. Following comprehensive research at the Archives Nationales de Paris, this paper will reveal the identity of Madame de Saint-Sauveur as a noblewoman who held a prominent position at Versailles as a sous-gouvernante and amassed a substantial fortune as the sole heiress of her father’s estate, before relocating to Paris in the heart of elite society, and forming a friendship with Madame du Deffand.
Female collectors such as Madame de Pompadour, the Comtesse de Verrue, and Madame du Barry are now well documented and well-known for their impressive, exceptional collections. In the pursuit of determining the experiences and practices of collectors, and particularly ‘overlooked’ female collectors, this research emphasises the need to determine what was ‘typical’ in order to fully understand the ‘exceptional’.
Natasha Shoory completed her BA in Art History and Theory at the University of Sydney in 2012, and her MA in The History and Business of Art and Collecting through the University of Warwick and IESA in 2016. She has spent the past two years working at Christie’s in London, handling copyright, picture research, and writing for Christie’s publications. She will be commencing an MSt in Modern Languages, focusing on the History of the Enlightenment, at the University of Oxford in October 2018, where she is the recipient of Worcester College’s Drue Heinz Graduate Scholarship. Her research interests focus on eighteenth-century France, particularly the role of women in the art and collecting of the Ancien Régime. She is currently researching the acquisition of eighteenth-century French artworks and furniture during the early twentieth century in America, for which she received a research travel grant from the Furniture History Society in 2017.
Monday 2nd June
Susan Bracken
Charles, Prince of Wales and Copies in Spain in 1623
Monday, 14th May
Barbara Pezzini
The truth about Agnew’s and Duveen (1900-1930)
Major private and public collections worldwide – such as the London National Gallery, the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Washington National Gallery of Art – contain a wealth of pictures from the stock of art dealers Agnew’s and Duveen. Often works were purchased from one firm to the other or even held in joint stock. Famous pictures of shared provenance include Philip IV by Diego Velázquez (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), Man with a Falcon by Titian (Omaha Museum of Art), and Portrait of James Christie by Thomas Gainsborough (Getty Museum, Los Angeles). Both Agnew’s and Duveen managed a conspicuous flow of works of art from London towards collectors in the United States, and both firms dealt in the same sectors of the art market: European old-masters and British eighteenth century portraits.
The relationship between the two firms, however, has so far remained largely unexplored. Were Agnew’s and Duveen ‘friends’ or ‘enemies’, allies or opponents? Using hitherto unexplored primary sources from the Agnew’s archive at the National Gallery and the Duveen archive at the Getty Research Center, the paper will examine this question and present the origins and development of their relationship from 1900 to 1930. Agnew’s and Duveen’s rapport changed dramatically in these thirty years. In the early 1900s, when the newcomer Duveen captured the trust of the more senior Agnew’s, there was a respectful competition which evolved into a collaboration in the course of the 1910s. But in the 1920s Duveen’s attempted, in covert and not so covert manners, to annihilate Agnew’s, and this paper will investigate Duveen’s offensive strategies and Agnew’s coping mechanisms. In addition, and crucially for a seminar dedicated to collecting and display, this paper will focus on the relationship that both dealers fostered with public and private collectors, as it was essential to the survival, and instrumental to the demise, of their firms.
Barbara Pezzini is a London-based art and cultural historian with a wide range of publications on the art market, including reconstructions of fin-de siècle exhibitions of British painting, the Futurist shows in London, the relationship between dealers and scholars in the early twentieth century and their interactions with the art press. She is particularly interested in the study of the intersection of the art market with art criticism and art practice and how these are reflected in art prices. Barbara is the recipient of an AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Award between the National Gallery and the University of Manchester to study the relationship between the National Gallery and Agnew’s (1850-1950) and Editor-in-Chief of the journal Visual Resources. She is also part of a joint National Gallery/King’s College London project on (re)presenting data from the stock books of the dealers Thos. Agnew & Sons.
Monday, 16th April
Alice Otazzi
«Les derniers venus sont aujourd’hui les premiers». English prints collections in 18th-century Paris.
This paper aims to investigate the (re)discovery of English art in 18th-century Paris. The English artistic tradition was not greatly admired in the previous centuries and it was just around the middle of the 18th century that an interest developed towards this art. In a comparative approach that will involve both literature and philosophy, the principal promoters of Anglomania will be discussed, highlighting the interaction between general culture and artistic outcomes. The examination of Parisian sales catalogues and some French public archives will allow the identification of the presence of English works of art offering further reasons for reflecting the origin of a specific taste in connection to the concept of an English school, which will represent the discriminating factor in the analysis of the dynamics of the reception of the English school in 18th-century France.
Reconstructing a panorama which has been since underestimated, she will examine the presence of English works of art, predominantly prints, that dominated the Parisian scene during the 70’s and 80’s. Undertaking this investigation allows the outlining of English artists who were collected in France, bringing to light names nowadays almost unknown. Studying private (Marquis de Beringhen, Marquis de Paulmy, Duc de Richelieu, Princesse de Lamballe) and royal collections (Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette) it will be possible to understand the reasons behind this practice of collecting and its evolution during the 18th century. At the beginning of the century, English prints were collected because of their specific technique, mezzotint or, later, crayon manner, and in the second half of the 18th century for the name of the artist himself or the subject they represent. Finally, some post-mortem inventories hold information on the display of these prints, enabling to deepen and complete the analysis of the collection of English prints in Paris.
Alice Ottazzi is currently a Teaching Assistant in History of Art Criticism and Museum Studies, Università degli Studi di Torino, Department of Humanities. Her PhD is in progress, jointly supervised by Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne.
She is also responsible for the section “Drawing” of the handbook Il Cricco Di Teodoro Itinerario nell’arte (Zanichelli Editore S.p.a., Bologna). She was a contributor to the catalogue of the exhibition L’Europe et les mythes Grècs : Dessins du Musée du Louvre XVIème – XIXème siècles, exhibition curated by C. Loisel, Fondation Teloglion, Thessalonica, 2012 as well as Témoignages d’une condicio sine qua non. La réception des procédés de fixage des pastels dans la littérature artistique du XVIII siècle, in B. Jouves & A. Delaporte (Eds.), Réception critique de la restauration. XVIIIe-XXe siècles, Éditions du GRHAM, 2017.
Monday, 5th March
Wallis Miller
Full-scale displays and the reform of architecture in Germany
She is currently working on a book titled Architecture on Display: Exhibitions and the Emergence of Modernism in Germany, 1786-1932. The book uses German case studies to reveal the particular character of an architecture exhibition and demonstrate the ways in which exhibitions contributed to modernism in architecture. She will focus on a specific form of display, the full scale interior, and the ways in which a means of presentation originally developed to portray the past, in the form of the period room, became a catalyst for the early twentieth-century reforms that led to the emergence of Modern Architecture.
In contrast to its use in portraying history, the period room display was appropriated around the turn of the century by applied arts exhibitions in Germany to show the newest work in design. The period room emerged in the 1870s as an ethnographic display tool in Stockholm’s Nordic Museum and, by the 1920s, was firmly associated with exhibiting the past in a range of museums, including ones dedicated to art and applied art. But already around 1900 the period room was used as a model for the displays that realized the theoretical ambition of progressive designers of applied art to “engage art in life” and, in some cases, create a Gesamtkunstwerk [the total work of art]. In the largest exhibition of these rooms, the “Spatial Art” or “Raumkunst” section at “The Third German Applied Arts Exhibition 1906,” held in Dresden, the modernity on display in 150 realistic interiors did not reside in their style, which varied widely. Instead it could be seen in the ambition to create full-scale environments that, like the period rooms, engaged a broad public rather than a limited audience of patrons, and in their identification with “space”. These were two aspects of Modern Architecture that became central when it matured in the Weimar Period. Indeed the exhibition included several designers who soon would become significant modern architects (Henri van de Velde, Peter Behrens and Bruno Paul) and suggested that the applied arts exhibition was the vehicle for introducing the new ideas about the public and space to architecture. The claim that applied art was an agent of change in this crucial period for the development of architecture was advanced in theoretical writings at the time but is seldom recognized in the history of architecture or design, particularly the history that engages the establishment of the German Werkbund, one of the best-known institutional promoters of modern design and architecture from 1907-1933. She will call attention to the role of applied art in the history of Modern Architecture by arguing that the full-scale displays at exhibitions go beyond the claims of theoretical writings to initiate significant reforms in architecture.
Wallis Miller is the Charles P. Graves Associate Professor of Architecture, July 2001-present at the University of Kentucky, College of Design. She has also been at The Oslo Centre for Critical Architecture Studies, The Oslo School of Architecture and Design Visiting Scholar, research project “The Printed and the Built” (research, Ph.D. advising, organization), 2014-2018; in residence May-June 2016
Her many publications include the following (full text version of selected publications on view at http://design.uky.edu/web/miller.html)
“Review: The extraordinary coverage of Ludwig Hoffmann’s 1901 ‘Exhibition of the City of Berlin,’“The Printed and the Built: Architecture, Print Culture, and Public Debate in the Nineteenth Century, Mari Hvattum and Anne Hultzsch eds. (London: Bloomsbury, 2017/8).
“An exhibition and its catalogue: Herbert Bayer’s “minor typographical masterpiece” for the Werkbund’s 1930 Section Allemande,” accepted for Architectural Histories, special issue on Word and Image (2016). Winner of outstanding Journal article award, SESAH, 2017.
“Les Maquettes, l’architecture, et l’exposition de l’académie en Allemagne, 1786-1923,” in Cahiers du NMAM, Centre Pompidou, Paris (Fall 2014).
“Exhibitions, Objects and the Emergence of Modernism in Germany,” in Exhibiting Architecture: A Paradox?, ed. Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen (New Haven: Yale School of Architecture, 2015).
“Was ist Architketur? Modelle in deutschen Akademie Ausstellungen bis 1923,” in Architektur Ausstellen. Zur mobilen Anordnung des Immobilien, Carsten Ruhl, Chris Dähne, eds. (Berlin: Jovis, 2015).
Monday, 12th February
Grant Lewis
‘Visual Knowledge and the Grand Tour: The Print Collection of Walter Bowman’
The Grand Tours of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries have long proved a rich field for historians of collecting, and increasingly this is as much the case for acquisitions of ‘lesser’ arts like prints as for the celebrated purchases of painting and sculpture. Indeed, over the past few decades several Grand Tourists’ print collections have been the subject of in-depth investigations, and in a new contribution to this body of work, this paper will focus on the collection of the Scottish tutor and antiquary Walter Bowman (1699-1782). Surviving in several carefully curated and presented albums of French and Italian views in the National Library of Scotland and the British Library, each with their own fine manuscript title-page, this collection has been totally overlooked by print scholars, so much so that the two proudly signed volumes in the British Library go unmentioned in Bowman’s entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Yet this is a significant, indeed rare, collection, for unlike the better studied Grand Tour collectors Bowman was not a tourist as such but a cicerone, a guide for foreign travellers, and as a result his collection has a different character from the latters’ aristocratic ones, containing rudimentary and worn out impressions as well as fine art prints, not to mention a distinct function as a dependable educational resource. By bringing together all of the surviving volumes owned by Bowman, this paper aims to provide the foundational study into this intriguing collection, its formation, display, use(s) and ultimate fragmentation, which saw the parts now at the British Library enter the collection of George III. To this end, it will make use of archival research into Bowman’s little-studied papers, in particular his European travel diary (now Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale), which, covering the same locations as the print collection, demonstrates how visual and textual knowledge were ‘collected’ simultaneously, and devised to complement each other.
Since 2015 Grant Lewis has been at the British Library: as part of the fledgling prints and drawings team at the British Library responsible for cataloguing King George III’s Topographical Collection, a vast array of some 40-50,000 prints and drawings dating from the 1500s to the 1820s.
Monday, 15th January
Amanda Luyster
Collections/Recollections: The Use of Text in Networks of Collection. Medieval Inventories, Labels, Inscriptions, and Memory
Allow me to begin with a question. What do an eighth-century Byzantine textile, a fifteenth-century Italian painting, and a twentieth-century silkscreen by Andy Warhol have in common? The answer: all bear inscriptions that tie them inexorably to larger systems of collecting and collection use. This association of specific kinds of textual data (names, dates) with a collectable object has a long and, at least in part, understudied history. In the following presentation, I examine the history of the association of texts with collected objects, focusing on the Middle Ages while remaining attentive to earlier and later traditions.
Before the Renaissance and its elevation of the role of the individual artist, probably the most significant association a collected object would have was with the individual who had gifted it (its donor). Medieval collections can be viewed as fluid networks in which donors, recipients, record keepers, and objects like luxury textiles and precious metalwork all play a role. However, the texts associated with medieval collections, including inventories, gift lists, labels and tags, and inscriptions, are also significant. These textual actors, especially labels and tags, have received scant scholarly attention and yet have significant ramifications. After having laid out evidence for the broad use of tags and labels in collections, both European and Islamic, I make three interconnected arguments for the operation of texts within medieval networks of collection. These textual components, I suggest, enable the objects to recall (for the people in these networks) particular donors and events – that is, with the aid of texts, collections may act as agents of recollection.
First, I argue that inventories, gift lists, labels and tags need to be seen as operating in tandem with certain inscriptions on collected objects (those that include donor information). Second, I show that all of these texts work to enable different networks of collection (e.g. English thirteenth-century royal treasuries and ecclesiastical treasuries) to function differently. Finally, I posit that these networks of people, things, and, significantly, texts functioned to make the value of the gift “stick” – they worked to combat the tendency of all historical connections to be forgotten, the tendency of all things to fall apart. While at first glance, collected objects held in storage seem to be in a passive, dormant state, in fact, these objects and their associated texts participate in acts of collection and recollection that actively preserve not only the objects but also – and, more importantly – the associations that endow them with value.
Amanda Luyster: Lecturer, College of the Holy Cross, Worcester, MA. 2006-present. The International Center of Medieval Art. Elected to Board of Directors, 2017-2020.
Her recent publications include:
“The Place of a Queen/A Queen and her Places:Jeanne de Navarre’s Kalila and Dimna as a political manuscript in early fourteenth century France.” In Moving Women, Moving Objects, eds. Tracy Hamilton and Mariah Proctor-Tiffany. Brill. Accepted, under revision.
“Drawing Out, Drawing In: Painting, Drawing, Manuscript Illumination, and Book Illustration.” In Mapping the Medieval Mediterranean, c. 300-1550, ed. Amity Law. Brill. Forthcoming.
“The Conversion of Kalila and Dimna: Raymond de Béziers, Religious Experience, and Translation at the Fourteenth-Century French Court.” Gesta, vol. 56, no. 1, 2017: 81-104.
collectinganddisplay.org 