Marginal annotations to printed books are a little studied aspect of the history of books and the transmission of ideas, providing a commentary on published texts which is conventionally anonymous, critical and economical. While many annotations are no more than individual comments on or disagreements with what an author has written, in a significant number of cases marginal notes have been found to be authorial, often adding an important new dimension to the original text.
The first major examination of Anthony van Dyck's work as a portraitist and an essential resource on this aspect of his illustrious career This landmark volume is a comprehensive survey of the portrait drawings, paintings, and prints of Anthony van Dyck (1599-1641), one of the most celebrated portraitists of all time. His supremely elegant style and ability to convey a sense of a sitter's inner life made him a favored portraitist among high-ranking figures and royalty across Europe, as well as among his fellow artists and art enthusiasts. Showcasing the full range of Van Dyck's fascinating international career with more than 100 works, this catalogue celebrates the artist's versatility, inventiveness, and influential approach to portraiture. Works include preparatory drawings and oil sketches that shed light on Van Dyck's working process, prints that allowed his work to reach a wider audience, and grand painted portraits. Some of the masterpieces are drawn from the exceptional holdings of The Frick Collection, while other works are presented here for the first time. Also included are drawings by some of Van Dyck's contemporaries--including his teacher Peter Paul Rubens--that illuminate the lineage of his working method. With insightful contributions by a team of international scholars, this unparalleled study of Van Dyck offers a compelling case for the distinctiveness and importance of the artist's work.
"....This book is divided into three parts....The first volume is focused on the copies and adaptations that Rubens made from the work of Raphael and three younger artists, Giulio Romano, Polidoro da Caravaggio, and Perino del Vaga, who worked with him in Rome before moving to art centres elsewhere."--Author's preface.
In the eighteenth century's burgeoning culture of travel and "Grand Tours," Rome was the essential destination. From all over Europe, artists jostled with art lovers and collectors of antiquities, each influencing the other in their respective ambitions. The cult of Rome was particularly strong in France, and this volume looks at more than 100 works by artists such as Hubert Robert, Jean-Honoré Fragonard and Jacques-Louis David, who made pilgrimages to the "Eternal City" and who were decisively influenced by their time there. The works are contextualized across five different sections: the first focuses on the tradition of academic training in Rome; the second explores the depiction of the city's landscape and surrounding countryside; the third looks at Rome and Paris' cultures of art lovers, patrons and artists; the fourth section examines the eighteenth-century conception of antiques; and the final section looks at Rome's annual festivals, and their influence on French artists.
Seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish paintings were aesthetic, intellectual, and economic touchstones in the Parisian art world of the Revolutionary era, but their importance within this framework, while frequently acknowledged, never attracted much subsequent attention. Darius A. Spieth’s inquiry into Revolutionary Paris and the Market for Netherlandish Art reveals the dominance of “Golden Age” pictures in the artistic discourse and sales transactions before, during, and after the French Revolution. A broadly based statistical investigation, undertaken as part of this study, shows that the upheaval reduced prices for Netherlandish paintings by about 55% compared to the Old Regime, and that it took until after the July Revolution of 1830 for art prices to return where they stood before 1789.
