When Cardinal Odoard Farnese was looking to decorate the barrel-vaulted gallery of his lavish 16th-century palace, the cardinal’s brother, the Duke of Parma, Piacenza and Castro, recommended Annibale Carracci. In 1597 Carracci took up the commission with instructions to base his composition on the theme of the “Loves of the Gods” to mark the wedding of the Duke of Parma to the grandniece of Pope Clement VIII, Margherita Aldobrandini.

The cycle consists of a series of mythological scenes set within frames and architectural elements. The composition’s centrepiece, The Triumph of Bacchus and Ariadne, depicts the lovers in tiger- and goat-driven chariots. The ceiling took 11 years to complete, during which time Carracci enlisted the help of his brothers Agostino, Ludovico and Antonio, as well as artists from his workshop including Giovanni Lanfranco and Domenichino.

Work to stabilise the vault was first undertaken in the late 17th century by artist Carlo Maratta and various initiatives to protect and secure the ceiling were carried out in 1923, 1936 and most recently, in 1994.

Plans for the restoration project are still being finalised and the scientific committee tasked with overseeing the project has yet to be announced. Carracci’s use of both true fresco as well as a secco (pigments tempered with egg, oil or glue are applied to dry plaster) techniques in the ceiling’s decoration may complicate the restoration as conservators will need to make sure that certain delicate elements such as shading, which was often executed in a secco, are not removed during the cleaning process.

By Emily Sharpe | From issue 226, July-August 2011
Published online 27 Jul 11 (Conservation)

STUTTGART.- Hans Holbein the Elder: The Grey Passion in its Time opened at the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart on 27 November as part of the Große Landesausstellung Baden-Wurttemberg is the first exhibition devoted to the artist in 45 years. At the heart of the exhibition is Holbein’s Grey Passion, a series of twelve panels painted between 1494 and 1500. The artist’s magnum opus is presented in the context of other treatments of the subject, both in painting and in print, by Holbein’s precursors and contemporaries, among them Jan van Eyck, Hans Memling, Martin Schongauer, Albrecht Dürer, Hans Baldung Grien and Matthias Grünewald.

Acquisition
The Staatsgalerie was able to acquire the Grey Passion in 2003 thanks to the success of a large-scale fundraising campaign. In a joint effort the government of Baden Wurttemberg, the Kulturstiftung der Länder (Cultural Foundation of the Federal States), the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and Media, the Friends of the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, the Landesbank Baden-Wurttemberg, Daimler AG, Robert Bosch GmbH and numerous public and private donors raised €13 million to secure the paintings for the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart.

Restoration
A fascinating part of the exhibition is the presentation of the painstaking restoration of the Grey Passion. Begun in 2008 and subsidised to the tune of €400,000 by a special fund in the Baden Wurttemberg budget, it is the largest conservation and restoration project undertaken by the Staatsgalerie to date. A long-term documentary film produced by the Steinbeis Transfer Centre at the Stuttgart Media University traces the restoration work and offers an exclusive insight into the conservation studio of the Staatsgalerie. The camera follows the team of restorers as they carry out a wide range of tasks, from the microscopic analysis of paint layers to the careful assessment of damage and losses. Cutting-edge technology (for example OSIRIS, a high-resolution digital camera for infrared photography and reflectography) and the detailed examination of materials and painting techniques have yielded groundbreaking insights into the work of Hans Holbein the Elder.

Semi-grisaille: The Passion in an unusual colour scheme
Visitors to the exhibition will discover one of the most outstanding Passion cycles of early German art. The twelve panels originally adorned the back and front of the wings of an altarpiece devoted to the Passion of Christ. Opened, they would have framed a central shrine, now lost, probably a carved multi-figure composition of the Crucifixion. The original location of the altarpiece remains unidentified.

Of particular note are the emotional intensity and compositional unity Hans Holbein the Elder brought to the story of the Passion of Christ. His unruffled compositions and idealised depiction of Christ anticipate conventions that were to flourish in the Renaissance. Confident in his abilities as an artist, Holbein turned his back on long-established traditions and steered clear of the often graphic descriptions of the suffering of Christ that pervaded the work of his forebears.

Special attention is devoted to the execution of the panels in semi-grisaille – alluded to in the name of the cycle – which is extremely rare in European altar painting. Drawing on the grisaille style of Jan van Eyck and Rogier van der Weyden, Holbein developed a unique and extraordinarily subtle monochrome palette in which colour is limited to flesh tints and a few intensely luminous touches highlighting blood, rings, torches and the crown of thorns. The haunting poignancy of the events depicted is eloquently conveyed by the artist’s sophisticated use of shades of grey, ochre and green.

Size of the exhibition
The exhibition consists of approximately 45 panel paintings (some of them painted on both sides) and altarpieces, 94 works on paper as well as some sculptures and stained glass.

International loans
The Staatsgalerie has been able to secure loans for the exhibition from leading international museums, among them the Kunstmuseum Basel, the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, the British Museum in London, the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen in Munich, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Musée du Louvre in Paris and the Kunsthistorische Museum in Vienna.

The international significance of the exhibition Hans Holbein the Elder: The Grey Passion in its Time is underlined by a sensational loan from the Albertina in Vienna: The Staatsgalerie Stuttgart will receive eight priceless drawings from Albrecht Dürer’s Green Passion, a series of drawings so valuable that loans are granted every 25 years only. Because works on paper are extremely sensitive to light and in order to minimise exposure, only four drawings can be shown at any one time; the second set of four drawings will go on show half way through the exhibition.

source :  http://www.artdaily.com

“The Three Graces” painting has always been in private hands, has, in fact, been owned by members of one French family since 1932, Le Parisien reports. The small work depicts three nude women — seen from the back, the front, and in profile — whose identity is not certain. The fundraising Web site asks, “Are these the three Graces, as the title indicates, or, as some specialists believe, is this an allegorical representation of Charity, Friendship, and Fidelity?” The unusual poses of the three young ladies add to the mystery: the woman in the center for instance sports an unusual flat hat, which is somewhat out of keeping with an allegorical representation, and the woman on the right clasps her raised ankle as if stretching her quadriceps.

The Louvre is eager to bring the painting into its collection, declaring on the Web site that “the work’s astonishing perfection, its extreme rarity, and its remarkable state of preservation allow it to be called a ‘national treasure,’” though it was painted not in France but in Germany. The work’s small size likely indicates that it was commissioned for a patron’s home, and Louvre experts speculate that this allowed Cranach to make the painting more provocative, for the painting emits a “disturbing eroticism,” according to the site, with the black background focusing all attention on the women’s flesh. In a video interview, Vincent Pomarède, head of the museum’s painting department, praises the artist’s extreme skill at depicting nudes, adding that laboratory testing showed that there were no preliminary studies underneath the painting, indicating that it was the work of Cranach the Elder’s hand alone.

While this kind of public fundraising by a museum is a first in France, it happens frequently in Great Britain. The Tate Gallery used publicly-raised funds to buy a Rubens drawing for £5.7 million ($10.5 million) in 2008. Even more impressively, the National Gallery of Scotland managed to raise £100 million ($156 million) to purchase two Titian paintings from the Duke of Sutherland in 2009. And back in 1994, the National Gallery of Scotland kept a different “Three Graces” in its country — this one a sculpture by Canova — using funds from the National Heritage Memorial Fund and a large donation by the late philanthropist John Paul Getty II.

The three million euros raised so far come from the Louvre’s acquisitions funds and the support of the Mazars Company. On the Louvre’s fundraising Web page, gifts as small as €20 ($27) are accepted, but individuals contributing €200 ($270) will be invited to a special viewing of the painting, while those who donate €500 ($680) will have the opportunity to preview the work before it is revealed to the general public. The museum has until January 31, 2011, to raise the necessary funds.

Cranach is known to have treated the theme of the three Graces only twice. The other painting, which dates from 1535, is in Kansas City’s Nelson-Atkins Museum. Cranach must have had his previous “Three Graces” in mind, for the women’s bodies are similarly arranged, though their gestures are more formal, and the flashy hat has disappeared.

CAIRO (AP).- Archaeologists have unearthed the upper part of a double limestone statue of a powerful pharaoh who ruled nearly 3,400 years ago, Egypt’s Ministry of Culture said Saturday.

A ministry statement said the team of Egyptian archaeologists discovered the 4-foot (1.3-meter) by 3-foot (0.95-meter) statue of Amenhotep III in Kom el-Hittan, the site of the pharaoh’s mortuary temple in the southern city of Luxor.

The temple is one of the largest on the west bank of the Nile in Luxor.

The statue portrays Amenhotep III wearing the double crown of Egypt, which is decorated with a uraeus, and seated on a throne next to the Theban god Amun.

Amenhotep III, who was the grandfather of the famed boy-pharaoh Tutankhamun, ruled in the 14th century B.C. at the height of Egypt’s New Kingdom and presided over a vast empire stretching from Nubia in the south to Syria in the north.

The pharaoh’s temple was largely destroyed, possibly by floods, and little remains of its walls. But archaeologists have been able to unearth a wealth of artifacts and statuary in the buried ruins, including two statues of Amenhotep made of black granite found at the site in March 2009.

Copyright 2010 The Associated Press.

Contrary to a report in the Art Newspaper that the palace itself will no longer display contemporary art, a Versailles spokesperson told ARTINFO that nothing has yet been determined for following years, and that pieces are expected to appear in the château itself again. The Murakami show will close on December 12, and in January Versailles will announce its choice of artists to be exhibited on the premises in 2011 and 2012. In keeping with Aillagon’s practice of alternating French and international artists, the palace will choose a French artist next year and feature a foreign artist in the following year.

The Art Newspaper reports that 2012 may bring Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan to Versailles, though the Versailles spokesperson told ARTINFO that while “he is an option” nothing has yet been confirmed. The Guggenheim Museum plans to open a Cattelan retrospective in New York next year.

As ARTINFO previously reported, Murakami’s show provoked a great deal of controversy in the conservative-leaning enclave of Versailles. Ultimately, 12,000 signatures were gathered on petitions circulated by two different protest groups. When Jean-Jacques Aillagon was asked by a reader of Libération in an online forum why he thought French artist Xavier Veilhan’s work had not provoked the same controversy as that of Koons and Murakami when he showed there in 2009, he answered that it may have been because it was displayed in the gardens outside Château, or “maybe also because Xavier Veilhan is French and some people have, on principle, less hostility toward a French artist than a foreign artist.”

After the Murakami opening on September 14 Aillagon blogged that he felt “an intellectual obligation not to give into prejudice and especially not to fanaticism” in arranging programming at Versailles. But he added: “What a great country we have! Here a debate on contemporary art can become a real public debate to which newspapers, magazines, radio, and television pay very serious attention.”

source: http://www.artinfo.com/news/story/35928/versailles-site-of-murakami-controversy-will-limit-contemporary-art-to-its-gardens-in-2011/

Known as the Portrait of Dwarf Morgante, the painting, a two-sided canvas which portrays a court jester, was made before 1553 by mannerist painter Agnolo di Cosimo, better known as Bronzino (1503-1572).

Long considered to be obscene, the full frontal view of the naked dwarf was painted over in the 18th century.

“Moralizing brushes added vine leaves and grapes all over, turning Morgante into a Bacchus serving wine,” said Antonio Natali, the director of the Uffizi Gallery and one of the curators of the show, said at a news conference last week.

The artwork has been freshly restored in the labs of the Opificio Delle Pietre Dure in Florence and put on display at the first ever retrospective of the Italian master, who is noted for his cold but realistic and sophisticated portraits of the Medici clan.

“The dwarf portrait is one of the centerpieces of this show. For the first time, we can see the real Bronzino painting,” Natali said.

Placed on a pedestal at the center of the room, the painting offers a frontal view of Morgante, posing with a hunting owl while large moths flutter around his private parts.

The rear view shows the deformed huntsman seen from the back, holding his trophy of birds.

Listed in a Medici inventory dated 1553, the portrait was moved to various Florentine collections, meanwhile losing its identity.

Ironically named after the giant Morgante Maggiore in the 15th-century epic poem by Luigi Pulci, the dwarf is recorded to have arrived at the court of Cosimo I de’ Medici (1519-74), Grand-Duke of Tuscany, around 1540.

According to Vasari, the dwarf was “clever, learned and very kind, the favorite of our Duke.”

Indeed, historic accounts reveal that in 1555 the Grand Duke granted Braccio di Bartolo (this was the real name of the individual affected by achondroplasia dwarfism) a honor, calling him “our beloved dwarf.”

“While Morgante entered the courts as a possession, he is mentioned in a document where Cosimo bequeathed him land and the right to marry. He was a faithful companion to Cosimo I de’ Medici, and while he was asked to perform entertaining tasks, he also accompanied Cosimo on many diplomatic trips,” Touba Ghadessi, assistant professor of art history at Wheaton College, Norton, Massachusetts, told Discovery News.

As the Duke’s favourite jester, he was portrayed in several artworks. Sculptor Giambologna (1529-1608) mounted him on a dragon, while another sculptor, Valerio Cioli (1529-1599], immortalized him as the paunchy dwarf riding a tortoise in a sculpture at Boboli gardens.

According to Vasari, Bronzino’s work was unique.

“He made a full-length portrait of the dwarf Morgante, nude, and in two ways — namely, on one side of the picture the front, and on the other the back, with the bizarre and monstrous members which that dwarf has; which picture, of its kind, is beautiful and marvellous,” Vasari wrote.

The second half of the sixteenth century seems to have been a particularly populated time for dwarves at the Medici court.

“There is a series of engraving by Stradano showing the coronation of Cosimo and several dwarves are present,” Ghadessi, who authored Identity and physical deformity in Italian court portraits 1550-1650, said.

Called “nani,” the dwarfs entertained and amused, being the subject of fascination, laughter and ridicule.

Morgante’s case was no exception. Records testify that he was often mortified, and even had to fight, naked, with a monkey.

“Although he had a privileged role, as a dwarf he suffered humiliation and physical violence by certain courtesans,” art historian Sefy Hendler wrote in the exhibition’s catalogue.

Made to respond to a heated debate over which art, sculpture or painting, was nobler, Bronzino’s double faced portrait offered different viewpoints — just like a sculpture — as it depicted a popular court scene which amused the Grand Duke. According to historical accounts,  Morgante was often employed as a nocturnal bird hunter (the technique used a trained owl to capture little birds).

Moreover, the portrait, showing both the beginning and the end of the bird hunting, demonstrated that painting can depict the passage of time, which sculpture cannot.

“The newly restored portrait provides a unique evidence for the history of this character at the Medici court and shows that Bronzino is not only a great mannerist painter, but one of the masters of Italian art,” Natali said.

source: http://news.discovery.com/history/naked-dwarf-revealed-again-in-painting.html

The “Boîte-en-valise” was a miniature museum that Duchamp made containing 69 reproductions of his most celebrated creations, including readymades such as “Fountain,” the urinal that he transformed into a sculpture by signing it. He made 300 copies of the “Boîte-en-valise” but many are squirreled away behind museum glass and in private collections. As Mercier told ARTINFO France, “It was like a salesman’s box and it is surprising that finally so few people can have access to this work by Marcel Duchamp that is so well-known. It’s always displayed under glass, opened in the same way to the three vertical sections and the first images. No one really knows what’s inside!”

There were a number of significant hurdles to the project: when Mercier needed to get close enough to one of the original works to explore its parts and structure, he persuaded Paris’s Museum of Modern Art to allow him access to its “Boîte-en-valise.” Mercier also required the permission of Jacqueline Matisse-Monnier of the Duchamp family, which controls his estate, and the cooperation of Paul Franklin of the Marcel Duchamp Association. Luckily, Mercier had established a good relationship with the family dating back to his winning of the Marcel Duchamp Prize. At that time, he used his prize money to start a personal art collection and bought a Duchamp work from the estate. The authorship of the pop-up has been phrased so as to acknowledge Mercier’s role in its creation while still naming Duchamp (or Rrose Sélavy, his cross-dressing artistic alter ego) as the author: “The ‘Boîte-en-valise’ of either Marcel Duchamp or RRose Sélavy by Mathieu Mercier.”

There were also technical challenges. “The interpretative aspect of the [pop-up] boîte-en-valise consisted in choosing the way of reproducing the images and items in the box,” Mercier said. He had to work with pop-up experts to reproduce 80 percent of the items in the box in paper form, with the same scale as the originals.

In addition to the regular printing, there will be 100 numbered copies of the pop-up book on sale for €600 ($815) each — well within financial reach for any collector who’d like to own an (almost) real Duchamp.

source: http://www.artinfo.com/news/story/35913/duchamps-bote-en-valise-to-be-published-as-a-pop-up-book/

The controversy centers on a 2004 series of Ter-Oganyan’s work called “The Radical Abstractionism Project,” which consists of innocuous geometric shapes with captions attributing shocking meanings to each painting. Four of the works were to have appeared in the Louvre show, including the most provocative: a red rectangle with a diagonal black bar in the middle bearing text that reads, “This work urges you to commit an attack on statesman V. V. Putin in order to end his state and political activities.”

This slogan “could be understood as appeals for a coup-d’état and incitement to ethnic and religious hatred,” deputy Russian culture minister Andrei Busygin told Le Monde. “We don’t want to get bogged down in discussions about what the painter meant by this work. Is it a joke, something absurd, or something that falls under the purview anti-extremist legislation? Some will laugh — others will take it seriously.”

Some other works in the series include a painting of an upside-down yellow triangle on a black rectangular background with the description, “The goal of this work is to humiliate the Russians and the Jews.” Another depicting a large red “X” above an equals sign on a blue background claims it “encourage[s] prostitution.” Most humorously, a work consisting of evenly-spaced multicolored squares says that it “publishes false facts to discredit the honor and dignity of the mayor of Moscow, Y.M. Luzhkov.”

The show of Russian contemporary art, which joins other cross-national events planned for the diplomatic bridge-building France-Russia Year, is due to open October 14. With seven of the 15 artists participating having declared their decision to boycott the show, the coherence of the exhibition is in jeopardy. A Louvre representative told Agence France-Presse that the museum considers the imbroglio to be an “embarrassment.”

On a Russian art blog, Ter-Oganyan has posted an open letter to exhibition curator Marie-Laure Bernadac stating that persecution of artists by the Russian government in collusion with the Russian Orthodox Church has been on the rise, especially when the artists in question criticize religion. He describes the actions of the Russian Ministry of Culture as “the limits of idiocy in the relationship between art and power.”

Ter-Oganyan has lived in Prague for over 10 years, attaining political refugee status after criminal proceedings were initiated against him for a 1998 performance art piece in which he destroyed Russian Orthodox icons with an axe. The Russian art world has attained more and more visibility in recent years thanks to a groundswell of intensely wealthy collectors and alluring promoters like Dasha Zhukova and Maria Baibakova, but censorship of work considered to be anti-government is still common, and police have been known to turn a blind eye to violent attacks on galleries that show such art.

source: http://www.artinfo.com/news/story/35909/russia-blocks-artists-anti-putin-painting-from-louvre-show/

The hoard was found on farmland using a metal detector by Terry Herbert, as he searched land belonging to a farmer friend over five days in July. The Staffordshire hoard contains about 5kg of gold and 2.5kg of silver, making it far bigger than the Sutton Hoo discovery in 1939 when 1.5kg of Anglo-Saxon gold was found near Woodbridge in Suffolk.

Scientist are saying this could alter our perceptions of Anglo-Saxon England as radically, if not more so, as the Sutton Hoo discoveries, and is seen by some to be the equivalent of finding a new Lindisfarne Gospels or Book of Kells.

The Book of Kells and Lindisfarne Gospels are intricately illuminated manuscripts of the four New Testament Gospels dating from the 9th and 8th Centuries. So little is known about the period that the artifacts have already led historians to question some of their fundamental beliefs — such as whether Christianity had been embraced by the pagan Saxons much earlier than previously thought. This is possibly evidences by a war cross potentially found at the site.

After the Romans left Britain in the early 5th century, Anglo-Saxon tribes who had been sporadically harassing its shores for years invaded in force. The Angles and Saxons, were a warlike people from the shores of Northern Germany and they eventually invaded much of England. Here they established new kingdoms ranging from Wessex in the west to Kent and East Anglia in the east, while further north the Northumbrians dominated. But the most obscure of all the anglo Saxon kingdoms was Mercia, located in What is now the Midlands. This was the least understood of all the Germanic kingdoms, with its people geographically and ideologically isolated from the rest of Anglo-Saxon Britain, retaining more of it’s pagan past, while the other kingdoms became increasingly Christian. It in the heart of Mercia that the Staffordshire Hoard was discovered, and precisely for that reason this could be an important discovery.

The quality of the items shows a high level of workmanship, including intricately patterned helmets, as well as scabbards and sword hilts encrusted with exquisitely cut garnets. One item of particular interest in the haul is a strip of gold alloy, probably taken from a shield or sword belt. It is engraved, in misspelt Latin with a passage from the Old Testament: “Rise up, Lord, and may your enemies be dispersed and those who hate you be driven from your face.” How quickly they converted to Christianity is a still a mystery. The burials at Sutton Hoo, about 625, were pagan but some Christian symbols were found.

The Anglo-Saxon kingdoms were not Christians until St. Augustine’s arrival in 597 led to their gradual conversion. At first this conversion happened very slowly with the more southern ones converted first and with Mercia being farther inland was thought to have held on to paganism the longest. The significance of the find may cast doubts on what historians have always thought baout the Kingdoms of Mercia in this era, believing it was still pagan and worshipping the norse pantheon of gods such as Wodin and Tyr.

Whether the inscription, together with the several crosses also within the haul, indicates that Christianity was more prevalent or simply that they had been taken from further afield, is not yet clear. One thing that is certain is that all the items have a warlike theme. It appears they were decorative fittings stripped from the weapons they once adorned like a collection of trophies. Beyond this it is impossible to know at this time wether the hoard was the spoils from a single battle or taken by other means.

The Anglo Saxon tribes spoke Old English, a Germanic language which modern-day Britons would find largely unintelligible, yet is the root of their ancient tongue. Although the famous epic poem Beowulf is the most famous written volume of these people, it survives in only a single manuscript that has luckily come down to us thru the ages. So in a contrast to common perceptions, we have very little other written materials from these early English tribes, and anything that does exist describing these people is from a later period. This discovery is certain to fuel our imagination, and provide us with more answers to some of the questions we still need to answer about the early development of England.

from wonderful blog Ancient web

http://www.theancientweb.com/community/articledetail.aspx?article_id=26

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