Renaissance Painting Research Articles

The Sober and the Silly

In Wound Culture: Trauma in the Pathological Public Sphere (1997), Mark Seltzer approaches our culture in terms of the collapse of private and (subject and world), claiming (as Susan Sontag later would) that there is a public fascination with torn and open bodies and torn and open persons, calling it a gathering around shock, trauma, and the wound. Using examples from literature and film, Seltzer examines this element of spectacle, what he refers to as the pathological sphere, concluding that sociality and the wound have become inseparable, an intriguing commentary on the collective response to images of trauma. (1) In Regarding the Pain of Others (2003), Sontag offers a historical survey of representations of atrocity, focusing on images of war using examples ranging from Goya's early nineteenth-century Disasters of War to one of the many exhibitions of 9/11 photographs, Here is New York. She begins to get at the politics of meaning-making when she notes that such photographs elicit varied and opposing reactions, ranging from calls for peace to cries for revenge as well as bemused awareness ... that terrible things happen. She points out (rightly so when one considers the speed of image capture, dissemination, and simultaneous access) that this witnessing of atrocities is an inevitable condition of modernity and that the knowledge of war gained by those who have not experienced it firsthand is informed exclusively by such images, which are considered as real. She writes of the shame and shock of looking at horror and questions who should have the right to experience these images suggesting it is only those with the ability to alleviate the suffering, and claiming those without that agency to be voyeurs. (2) Art critic and cultural theorist Abigail Solomon-Godeau, in Remote Control: Abigail Solomon-Godeau's Dispatches from the Image Wars (2004), argues that the image is always considered more volatile, dangerous, and uncontrollable than written or verbal descriptions, even detailed ones. She discusses the issue of transgressive imagery as it transcends the control of the entities that produce it. Solomon-Godeau contends that images take on a second active life when those who view the images make their own meaning from them.1 It is this active and resistant response- by artists and citizens--that the contributors to this issue explore. As x allows greater access to images emanating from around the world (and from increasingly diverse sources) and as war, famine, natural disaster, and political and social strife continue to plague numerous regions of the globe, the images of these conditions are also readily available to consumers, often without full contextual information. How viewers receive and perceive these images informs their behavior and by extension our social realities. This special issue of Afterimage works to provide a greater understanding of these media effects on a cultural level through both the production of artistic responses and analyses of imagery found in mainstream media, contributing to the field of atrocity studies and to ongoing conversations about the aestheticization of images of violence. Engaging topics and events ranging across centuries--from Renaissance painting and the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, to 9/11 and the current wars in the Middle East--the critics, scholars, and artists presented here transcend received notions of the political to engage in a dialogue that, we hope, extends beyond these pages. Henry Giroux writes about the imposed forgetting and militarized pleasure found in the infamous Kill Team11 photographs, viewing them as emblematic of a new register of as much as a failed sociality--a widespread depravity of aesthetics that results in the transformation of spectacles of violence and brutality into collective pleasure. Francis Frascina discusses the kill team photographs as consistent with processes of disavowal at work in state censorship, embedded reportage, and numbing media saturation that dehumanize the Other, as well as the work of artists attempting to counter these processes by placing viewers in a to face relation with the Other. …

Classical myths in Italian Renaissance painting

Introduction 1. The fascination with classical myths 2. The all'antica ambience 3. The new artistic tradition 4. Adaptations of sculpted and painted mythologies from antiquity 5. The all'antica depiction of classical myths 6. Wall paintings on classical myths 7. Poesie.

Michel de Ghelderode, the Wooster Group, and postmodernist revisions of La tentation de saint Antoine

La tentation de saint Antoine initially recalls Hieronymus Bosch’s famous Renaissance painting or Flaubert’s onieric work‐in‐progress. A closer look at more recent adaptations of the story of Saint Anthony the Great, however, reveals that such transformations of the myth addressed shifting aesthetics in the twentieth century by combining genres and texts, designed to cast what Foucault considered Flaubert’s most modernist ideas in an entirely postmodern light. This paper examines two of these adaptations: first, Michel de Ghelderode’s multiple versions of the tale set in Flanders, published separately from 1919 to 1932, but not performed until 1957 as a radio play and marionette show; and, second, the Wooster Group’s provocative stage adaptation, which transplanted the hermit Anthony to an excess‐filled New York of the eighties in Frank Dell’s The Temptation of Saint Antony.What Flaubert created as a self‐reflexive commentary on the dangers of books, twentieth‐century adaptors turned into a postmodern statement about other contemporary media forms, including stage, radio, cinema, and television. More importantly, by strategically appropriating not only Flaubert’s subject matter, but also his composition technique and passages from his texts, these artists draw attention to the perils of a culture‐saturated twentieth century in which art had become adaptation.

How to Read Italian Renaissance Painting

How to Read Italian Renaissance Painting

Depth profiling reveals multiple paint layers of Louvre Renaissance paintings using non-invasive compact confocal micro-X-ray fluorescence

The High Renaissance marks one of the most significant and prolific periods of artistic production in painting. Artists of this epoch advanced many aspects of pictorial art that continue to be debated and researched today. The typical painting technique during this time period consisted of superimposing multiple layers of thinly applied paint to achieve realistic optical impressions and desired visual effects. The presence of multiple thin layers in Renaissance paintings presents a challenging case study. In the work presented here, a laboratory-based confocal micro-X-ray fluorescence analysis (CXRF) spectrometer called LouX3D is applied to the non-destructive study of the Renaissance paintings series Famous Men, from the Louvre collection. Elemental depth profiles measured directly on the paintings are compared to lateral scans and results of conventional analyses on cross-sections removed from the paintings in the same locations. This comparison enables a better evaluation of the feasibilities of CXRF depth profiling using the LouX3D set-up for the investigation of paint layers. The limit of depth profiling is reached due to absorption effects, which depend on the chemical composition of the paint layers, on their order and on the performance of the set-up. Care must be taken if the same element is present in adjacent layers, if the layers are thin (<10 μm), or if the composition within a layer is highly heterogeneous. Paint sequences on the original paintings, including later retouchings, were successfully detected using CXRF measurements. This study highlights the great potential of this laboratory-based method when used in combination with other techniques for completely non-invasive painting analyses.

Elementy uzbrojenia na kaflach renesansowych z założeń dworskich w Kozłowie

During archaeological excavations conducted on the site of the relics of manor houses in Kozłów, Silesia province, an impressive set of stove tiles has been discovered. Some of the tiles’ facings were decorated with representations that are interesting iconographic sources for the study of early medieval arms. The first tile was discovered in the remains of the manor from the late 15th and 16th c. Facing of this tile is decorated with a side profile of the rider’s head in a closed helmet with a crest. Visual presentation is not so detailed and not all the details of surface texture are sharp. The portrayed helmet is probably a tournament example called the frog face helm. Its bell is crowned with an extensive crest, which is an oval with short and long feathers modeled in different directions. At the back of the bell there are ribbon like mantlings visible. Due to the lack of large part of the tile it is difficult to determine whether the visible crested helm was a part of a heraldic motif or whether it was connected with representations of knightly culture such as tournament scenes for example. The first possibility seems more likely. The second tile was found in layers associated with the manor which functioned in the 16th century. The presentation on the facing of tile refers to a series of woodcuttings created by the German renaissance painter Georg Pencz, gathered under one title of Twelve Heroes of the Old Testament. These works were inspired by the text of the poem by Hans Sachs from 1531. The author was glorifying the heroic exploits of the twelve heroes from the Old Testament: Joshua, Gideon, Jephthah, Samson, Jonathan, David, Abia, Azah, Josaphat, Amazia, Hezekiah and Judas Maccabeus, portraying them as symbols of the defenders of Christianity. Facing of the tile from Kozłów is ornamented with the image of Juda’s king Amazia. Similar to a Pencz’s graphic, he has been presented in an armour with his head and torso slightly turned to the left. The whole scene was made with high attention to the details, which allows us to make some valuable observations on the components of the armour. The helm is a close helmet with bevor and gorget, depicted with a lifted visor. The torso is protected with a bulging breastplate with fauld attached below. The arm is covered with a massive overlapping breastplate pauldrons and bulging rerebrace. In the lower part, at the height of faulds, there is a visible fragment of a sword hilt, one and a half or two-handed, topped with an oval pommel. A similar suit of armour, often called Maximilian armour, was used in Europe since the 1630s. Armour of this type was popular at that time in Silesia as well, what is indicated by the numerous tombstone representations.

Medicæa Medæa: Art, astres et pouvoir à la Cour de Catherine de Médicis (review)

Reviewed by: Medicæa Medæa: Art, astres et pouvoir à la Cour de Catherine de Médicis Susan Broomhall Capodieci, Luisa, Medicæa Medæa: Art, astres et pouvoir à la Cour de Catherine de Médicis (Travaux d’Humanisme et Renaissance, 484), Geneva, Librairie Droz, 2011; pp. 728; 122 b/w illustrations; R.R.P. US$130.00; ISBN 9782600014045. This is an erudite work that struggles to contain the many varied strains of scholarship that it explores in the service of its central argument. Luisa Capodieci’s aim is to study astrological images, by which she means works with an explicitly talismanic quality and intent to effect, possessing a virtue that come from the stars. Her focus is to examine where these images occur in the figurative arts and to analyse precisely what they were intended to achieve. She makes clear that her focus is la magie savante, not demonology or popular witchcraft. Capodieci studies the epistemological traditions in which the programme of the images (as well as their talismanic effects, if any) is based. Where Frances Yates’s work sought to prove that magical meanings did pervade the culture and arts under the later Valois, Capodieci sets out to isolate specific instances and to determine what their meanings were. If the work of Yates serves as one springboard for the study, so too does that of her supervisor, Philippe Morel. His 2008 Mélissa: magie, astres et démons dans l’art italien de la Renaissance which analysed Italian Renaissance paintings with [End Page 199] magical or talismanic significance offers a contemporary culture to which Capodieci can compare Valois France. Capodieci’s project spans from the arrival of Catherine de Medici in France in 1547, to 1581 with the Balet comique de la Royne, which, she argues, is the final demonstration of Catherine’s power before her death in 1589. A driving question for Capodieci is to determine what role Catherine played in this field. However, readers expecting Catherine to be the heart of the study will be disappointed. Many of the works analysed are not directly related, or attributed, to Catherine, who is the explicit focus of only the book’s first section. Here, Capodieci recaps the long tradition of her reputation of a practitioner of the ‘dark arts’, a discussion that surprisingly does not consider whether Catherine’s gender might be a factor in the negative interpretations of her use of astrology. Other chapters explore items that have only speculative (and typically seventeenth- and eighteenth-century) attributions to Catherine. These include a manuscript merging classical, Greek, and Hebrew ideas about the power of angels, a bracelet combining features of an amulet and talisman, and books held in the Royal Library. Even acknowledging the uncertainty of their connection to Catherine, Capodieci concludes that their purposes were largely acceptable practices, protective rather than malefic, and within mainstream platonic and hermetic traditions. Capodieci then explores the capacity of impresa to be magical objects in the sense that they encapsulated the soul of their subject in word and image, and allowed humans to access divine truths. This leads to an examination of Henri II and Catherine’s choice of symbols (the moon, Juno, candles, butterflies, and Prudence among them). Catherine’s rainbow imagery, for example, may have represented a bridge between divine and terrestrial spheres, but Capodieci suggests again that contemporary functions of such images appear conventional rather than as talismanic. The second section commences with a detailed examination of philosophical and theological principles behind the potentialities of astrological images. Capodieci then studies the decorative programme in the Ulysses Gallery at Fontainebleau. Her highly detailed description of the various components of the ceiling’s design (no longer extant), and of the multiple interpretations of the figure of Ulysses in contemporary texts, leads to the conclusion that it was not a talismanic image. Likewise, analysis of the astrological intent of the ceiling in the Pavilion des Poëles suggests that its significance is largely horoscopic, reflecting expectations about the king’s destiny as a great ruler. This contributes to Capodieci’s building argument that the Valois did not present evidence of any sophisticated use of astral magic that warrants the dark...

Browning, Renaissance Painting, and the Problem of Raphael

You and I would rather read that volume, (Taken to his beating bosom by it) Lean and list bosom-beats of Rafael, Would we not? than wonder at Madonnas-- Her, San Sisto names, and Her, Foligno, Her, that visits Florence in a vision, Her, that's left with lilies in Louvre-- Seen by us and all world in circle. (1) One Word More laments loss of hundred love sonnets that Raphael had written to his mistress, Margherita, and cherishes shared knowledge of this historical detail--this small secret from Filippo Baldinucci--as quality that distinguishes Elizabeth's and Robert's veneration of painter from that of encircling world. The awareness of loss rather than loss itself is what matters most, since if sonnets had survived, then, no doubt, world would have closed in on them too, and because regret defers question of whether Raphael's poetry could really be more interesting than his painting. But importance of losses and discoveries, of knowledge of such things to cognoscenti, and of sharing of arcana with a readership, typified Robert Browning's response to Italian Renaissance art. Because he valued sense of discovering behind work, often in striking or improbable biographical details, and then tended to posit such life as origin and key to painting, his enthusiasm has sometimes been dismissed as inexpert or unsophisticated. (2) Relying on Vasari's Lives and Baldinucci's Notizie has obvious limitations, but centrality of biography tailored with Browning's perception of a new emphasis upon man as subject in paintings themselves. Browning's fascination for so-called primitives (Where you style them, you of little wit, / Old Master This and Early Other [Old Pictures in Florence, 8:60-61]), whom he began to collect, after a fashion, in Italy, is still essentially a poet's interest in what One Word More calls an alien to artist's(8.69). If his particular interest in and championing of Italian art of fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, the season/Of Art's spring-birth so dim and dewy, (Old Pictures in Florence, XXLII.177-178) therefore attests to what Walter Pater would describe as partial alienation from its own limitations whereby one art form would be observed to pass into condition of some other Browning's poems about painting may have something in common with other or revivalist modes of thinking, and most obviously with early Pre-Raphaelitism. (3) The primitivist revival had its roots in German Romanticism in last part of eighteenth century, but its purest expression came perhaps in early years of nineteenth century from Nazarene community in monastery of San Isidoro, in Rome. Valuing what they perceived to be closer spiritual connection to an ascetic Christianity in early Italian painters, Nazarene group emphasized devotional employment of images and celebrated simplicity and clarity of iconographical traditions--all of which implied a sympathetic relationship to Catholicism. Purity, of course, is always in one way or another issue, and in first years of Pre- Raphaelite movement, at least as it was later to be memorialized by William Holman Hunt, a similar reverence for what Hunt described as naive traits of frank expression and unaffected grace in early Italian art, had inspired Brotherhood to pick its quarrel with Victorian art establishment. (4) Browning, like many others, was influenced by Alexis Francois Rio's impassioned revaluation of Catholic art in De la poesie chretienne, first published in 1835 and later added to as De l'art chretien (1861-67), as well as by art history of his friend Anna Jameson, who transmitted Rio's ideas to an English audience and made them more palatable to Protestant sensibility, and he was also familiar with Francis Palgrave's Murray's Handbook for Travellers in Northern Italy (1842), which, again, set about re-evaluating early Italian painting. …

Florence and Baghdad: Renaissance art and Arab science

The use of perspective in Renaissance painting caused a revolution in the history of seeing, allowing artists to depict the world from a spectator's point of view. But the theory of perspective that changed the course of Western art originated elsewhere--it was formulated in Baghdad by the eleventh-century mathematician Ibn al Haithan, known in the West as Alhazen. Using the metaphor of the mutual gaze, or exchanged glances, Hans Belting--preeminent historian and theorist of medieval, Renaissance, and contemporary art--narrates the historical encounter between science and art, between Arab Baghdad and Renaissance Florence, that has had a lasting effect on the culture of the West. In this lavishly illustrated study, Belting deals with the double history of perspective, as a visual theory based on geometrical abstraction (in the Middle East) and as pictorial theory (in Europe). How could geometrical abstraction be reconceived as a theory for making pictures? During the Middle Ages, Arab mathematics, free from religious discourse, gave rise to a theory of perspective that, later in the West, was transformed into art when European painters adopted the human gaze as their focal point. In the Islamic world, where theology and the visual arts remained closely intertwined, the science of perspective did not become the cornerstone of Islamic art. Florence and Baghdad addresses a provocative question that reaches beyond the realm of aesthetics and mathematics: What happens when Muslims and Christians look upon each other and find their way of viewing the world transformed as a result?

Mental representation of compositions in paintings is based on their perceptual similarities

Recent studies have found that art works and human vision share some basic characteristics, such as statistical regularities (Graham & Field, 2007), motion (Kim & Blake, 2007), and lightness perception (Cavanagh, 2005). Perception of spatial relations is another important visual ability that artists have long been employed in their art works as composition. We investigated whether people utilize compositional information when they see paintings and if compositions are, indeed, mentally represented. In order to see whether people make use of the compositional information, Experiment 1 tested the hypothesis that paintings with similar compositions would interfere with target detection in a rapid serial visual presentation paradigm. The stimuli were 495 Renaissance paintings classified in advance into 6 different compositions based on experts' ratings. We found that target detection performance significantly decreased when the composition of the target image was consistent with the distracters compared to when they were inconsistent, suggesting the interference by the similar compositional information. Experiment 2 was conducted to examine whether paintings were mentally represented according to their compositions. If the interference effects found in Experiment 1 were due to representation of compositions, paintings with perceptually similar compositions should be closely placed in mental space. Participants learned to associate arbitrary numbers assigned to 30 paintings. The frequency of errors was measured to construct confusion matrices, which were then analyzed through multidimensional scaling. As expected, the paintings with the same composition were grouped together with significantly shorter psychological distances in a two-dimensional space. These results suggest that compositions in paintings are utilized and represented according to their perceived similarities. Our research supports the view that artists’ creation of visual works is based on their active exploration of how we see the world, and provides a possible link between human vision and aesthetic preference.

La problematización de la mímesis: Carlos de Haes y Galdós

In this article we propose an analysis of the attitude adopted by two Spanish realist artists of the nineteenth century, the landscape painter Carlos de Haes and the novelist Benito Perez Galdos, towards mimesis in their writings on painting. Their opinions are related to texts by their predecessors and contemporaries as Constable, Alfred Michiels, Federico Madrazo, Baudelaire and Zola. In the 1860s the academies of arts still clung to normative ideas on mimesis, inherited from the Neoplatonists of the Renaissance and favoured history painting. In his inaugural address for the members of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Madrid, Haes formulated a defence of painting the truth of nature, distancing himself prudently from mainstream academicism and openly from the “mere copying” of nature he identified with photography. Later in the nineteenth century, Galdos adopted a decided position against history painting and in favour of the expression of modern life in art. Mimesis, the central concept in the relationship between art and reality in the West, was not equal to “mere copying,” on the contrary, for Galdos and Haes, the balance between an exact image of the surrounding visible world and the creation of beauty and poetry was a permanent concern.

Identification of Different Copper Green Pigments in Renaissance Paintings by Cluster-TOF-SIMS Imaging Analysis

Time-of-flight secondary ion mass spectrometry (TOF-SIMS) imaging using cluster primary ion beams is used for the identification of a green painting layer on the scene The Angels Concert from the Issenheim Altarpiece (painted in 1516) from a German Renaissance painter, Matthias Grünewald. Copper carboxylate clusters inside a basic copper chloride (atacamite) layer have been identified and located in the copper green layer. The mechanisms of transformation of atacamite into copper carboxylates may be initiated by an aging of the paint layers. The combination of the high mass resolution of the technique together with a micrometer spatial resolution and the possibility to simultaneously identify both minerals and organics, has proven to be the method of choice for the study of the stratigraphy of a paint cross-section.

La renaissance du nu antique à Venise : Pietro Bembo et le Titien

The nude appears in Renaissance painting and literature on several occasions, in the wake of the recovery of many ancient masterpieces both literary and visual, as well as the resulting humanist reappraisal of the body. Its natural splendour resurfaced with special acclaim in Venice, most particularly in the painted works of Titian. Pietro Bembo's Carmina also shed new light on the topic of nudity. Comparison of these poems and Titian's art unveils a series of shared commonplaces, namely, Cupid as the naked child, the female nude bathing (Diana, Galatea) or in the privacy of her room (Danae, Venus) and the male nude in the form of both a Christian martyr (Saint Stephen, Saint Sebastian) and a pagan divinity (Pan, Dionysos). At once in their written and painted manifestations, these nudes correspond closely to the aesthetic precepts explicated by two contemporary theoreticians of art and literature, Lodovico Dolce and Pietro Aretino. The essential precepts are : softness, delicacy and strength, terribilith and grace.

Longing for the lost: ekphrasis, rivalry, and the figuration of notional artworks in Italian Renaissance painting

The Renaissance familiarity with ancient textual descriptions of artworks shaped contemporary readers to be accustomed to the absence, loss, permanence, damage, and total or partial recovery of the...

Pictorial depth increases body sway.

This study examines the effects of pictorial depth on postural stability. In our first experiment, two abstract paintings by Maria Elena Vieira Da Silva (1908-1992) were used. Viewing the unaltered paintings induced greater body sway in participants than the cubist transformations of the same paintings in which depth cues were neutralized. In our second experiment, a Renaissance painting by Piero Della Francesca (c.1415-1492) was used due to its strong perspective and sense of a recessed space in the visual field. Participants fixated either the recessed or the foregrounded area of the painting. Body sway was higher in the former case. Thus, body sway can even be modulated within the same painting according to variations of local depth information.

Вячеслав Иванов и искусство Ренессансa

Viacheslav Ivanov’s interest in Italian Renaissance painting is well known, and it has been analyzed more than once. For the most part, however, such investigations have treated poems of his with elements of ekphrasis or with mentions of artists and their paintings, or articles of his that refer to painting. In our opinion much remains to be said about this matter, and we offer some new materials relating to it. Among them are letters to Ivanov from members of his immediate circle (and, to a lesser, degree his own letters), which note his interest in Renaissance masters ; the reproductions of works of art that he wanted to have before his eyes throughout his life ; the advice that he gave to his friend and housekeeper M. M. Zamjatnina, who heard lectures on the subject and wrote about Renaissane painting ; finally, the books Zamjatnina checked out from the Geneva Library, volumes that could not have escaped Ivanov’s attention. These new materials demonstrate, firstly, that we should pay attention not only to paintings of the Italian Renaissance, but to those of the Northern Renaissance as well (German and Flemish artists above all). Secondly, we should pay much greater attention than previously to Ivanov’s attitude towards Botticelli. And, finally, we should examine the broad historical context in which he perceived Renaissance painting.

Occlusion Issues in Early Renaissance Art

Early Renaissance painters innovatively attempted to depict realistic three-dimensional scenes. A major problem was to produce the impression of overlap for surfaces that occlude one another in the scene but are adjoined in the picture plane. Much has been written about perspective in art but little about occlusion. Here I examine some of the strategies for depicting occlusion used by early Renaissance painters in relation to ecological considerations and perceptual research. Perceived surface overlap is often achieved by implementing the principle that an occluding surface occludes anything behind it, so that occlusion perception is enhanced by a lack of relationship of occluding contour to occluded contours. Some well-known figure-ground principles are also commonly used to stratify adjoined figures. Global factors that assist this stratification include the placement of figures on a ground plane, a high viewpoint, and figure grouping. Artists of this period seem to have differed on whether to occlude faces and heads, often carefully avoiding doing so. Halos were either eliminated selectively or placed oddly to avoid such occlusions. Finally, I argue that the marked intransitivity in occlusion by architecture in the paintings of Duccio can be related to the issue of perceptual versus cognitive influences on the visual impact of paintings.

Avtoportretni motiv umetnice s knjigo v roki

This article considers the book as an important emancipatory motif, expressing the tendency of women self-portrait painters to present themselves as educated and accomplished, and to establish their own subjectivity. In traditional self-portraits, since the Renaissance some female artists have presented themselves as autonomous active individuals depicted painting, reading, or playing a musical instrument. In the past, the motif of the reader has symbolized female erudition, education, and sophistication. In a time when women could only rarely attend school, the use of this motif represented an important and liberating gesture. In a period when artists preferred to portray women as nude seducers rather than as learned ladies, it was all the more important that some female artists endeavored to stress the role of women as readers. Although images of women authors with a book in their hands represented a symbol of learning and wisdom, this same motif could also be used to replace a female author’s signature. This is examined here with reference to the works of the Renaissance painter Sofonisba Anguissola.

Analytical Raman spectroscopic discrimination between yellow pigments of the Renaissance

The Renaissance represented a major advance in painting techniques, subject matter, artistic style and the use of pigments and pigment mixtures. However, most pigments in general use were still mineral-based as most organic dyes were believed to be fugitive; the historical study of artists’ palettes and recipes has assumed importance for the attribution of art works to the Renaissance period. Although the application of diagnostic elemental and molecular spectroscopic techniques play vital and complementary roles in the analysis of art works, elemental techniques alone cannot definitively provide the data needed for pigment identification. The advantages and limitations of Raman spectroscopy for the definitive diagnostic characterisation of yellow pigments that were in use during the Renaissance is demonstrated here in consideration of heavy metal oxides and sulphides; these data will be compared with those obtained from analyses of synthetic yellow pigments that were available during the eighteenth and nineteenth Centuries which could have been used in unrecorded restorations of Renaissance paintings.

Gothic Art in the Gilded Age. Medieval and Renaissance Treasures in the Gavet-Vanderbilt-Ringling Collection

The Ringling Museum of Art in Sarasota, Florida, was created by the circus entrepreneur John Ringling (1866-1936). Its collections include paintings, sculpture, and ‘decorative arts’ from the European Middle Ages and Renaissance, crowned by Piero di Cosimo's eccentric and wonderful Building of a Palace. The core of this group consists of items assembled by the Parisian collector-dealer Émile Gavet (1830-1904) and atmospherically displayed to visitors and clients in his gallery-residence near Nôtre-Dame. In 1889 Gavet commissioned from the Louvre curator Émile Molinier a sumptuous catalogue of this collection/stock. That same year, over 300 pieces – including Renaissance paintings, Gothic metalwork, medieval and Renaissance sculpture, furniture, maiolica, watches, gems, and wax portraits – were acquired from him by Alva, the energetic wife of the heir to the New York Central Railroad fortune, William Vanderbilt. Alva Vanderbilt (1853-1933) installed the collection in a ‘Gothic Room’ in her majestic summer villa (one...