Royal Collection Research Articles

Leonardo e il ghiaccio: l’interesse di Leonardo per l’arte fiamminga e viceversa

Leonardo and ice: Leonardo’s interest for the Flemish art and vice versa The aim of the article is to underscore the importance of cultural exchange: on the one hand Leonardo’s knowledge of Flemish oil painting techniques at the beginning of his career made it possible for him to improve his style; on the other hand his influence extended in an early stage to the Low Countries, and concerned thematical choices. The first part of the article focuses on the period in which Leonardo, during his apprenticeship in the workshop of Andrea del Verrocchio, became aware of the significance of the new oil technique, which had been imported in Florence due to economic contacts with Bruges in the fifteenth century and the role of Florentine families such as the Medici, the Portinari and the Pagagnotti. The possibilities of the new oil painting technique were explored in Florence in the workshops of Verrocchio and the Pollaiolo brothers. A signature in the Codice Atlantico testifies that Leonardo himself was acquainted with members of the Portinari family, active in Bruges. Knowledge of Flemish art became essential in technical and formal aspects of his first female portrait, the Portrait of Ginevra Benci, which had been ordered by Bernardo Bembo as a pendant to his own portrait, painted by Hans Memling during his mission in Bruges as an ambassador to the Venetian Republic. The second part intends to invert the focus and to study Leonardo’s influence on Flemish art by presenting several paintings on the subject of Jesus and Saint John embracing. This iconographic subject originates from a composition, once in the royal collection in Mechelen, of Leonardo’s pupil, Marco D’Oggiono. The Flemish painter Joos van Cleve probably saw it and started to produce many paintings on this subject in his workshop in Antwerp. These works were so successful that over fifteen of them survive in different collections in Europe, and constitute a good example of Flemish artists’ interest in Leonardo’s art.

Between the Völkisch Movement and National Socialism

The article examines the history of National Socialist discourse on music in the Volkisch movement, essentially spearheaded by the Berlin musicologist Oskar Fleischer (1856–1933). Director of the Royal Collection of Ancient Musical Instruments, his ideas are epitomized in his Musikalische Bilder aus Deutschlands Vergangenheit , staged at the Krolloper (Berlin) in 1912, and presents the history of music as a continuum from 1500 B.C. to the Reformation. At the center of his highly speculative interpretations—mostly rejected by experts but broadly accepted by the extreme right—is the elaboration of an autochthonous Germanic ( germanischen ) music culture with which the German is aligned, and how the Roman Catholic Church posed a threat to it.

Leonardo da Vinci's Animal Anatomy: Bear and Horse Drawings Revisited.

Simple SummaryLeonardo da Vinci was an outstanding artist of the Renaissance. He depicted numerous masterpieces and was also interested in human and animal anatomy. We focused on the anatomical drawings illustrating different parts of bear and horse bodies. Regarding Leonardo’s “bear foot” series, the drawings have previously been described as depicting a bear’s left pelvic limb; however, based on the anatomy of the tarsus and the digit (finger) arrangement, they show the right posterior limb. In addition, an unreported rough sketch of a dog/wolf antebrachium (forearm) has been identified and reported in detail in one of the drawings of the “bear’s foot” series. After a detailed anatomical analysis, the drawing “The viscera of a horse” has more similarities to a canine anatomy than to a horse anatomy, suggesting that it shows a dog’s trunk. Besides, the anatomies of the drawings depicting the horse pelvic limb and the human leg were analyzed from the unprecedented point of view of movement production.Leonardo da Vinci was one of the most influencing personalities of his time, the perfect representation of the ideal Renaissance man, an expert painter, engineer and anatomist. Regarding Leonardo’s anatomical drawings, apart from human anatomy, he also depicted some animal species. This comparative study focused only on two species: Bears and horses. He produced some anatomical drawings to illustrate the dissection of “a bear’s foot” (Royal Collection Trust), previously described as “the left leg and foot of a bear”, but considering some anatomical details, we concluded that they depict the bear’s right pelvic limb. This misconception was due to the assumption that the bear’s digit I (1st toe) was the largest one, as in humans. We also analyzed a rough sketch (not previously reported), on the same page, and we concluded that it depicts the left antebrachium (forearm) and manus (hand) of a dog/wolf. Regarding Leonardo’s drawing representing the horse anatomy “The viscera of a horse”, the blood vessel arrangement and other anatomical structures are not consistent with the structure of the horse, but are more in accordance with the anatomy of a dog. In addition, other drawings comparing the anatomy of human leg muscles to that of horse pelvic limbs were also discussed in motion.

Landkort over en samling. Hvad katalogposterne kan fortælle om Otto Thotts håndskriftsamling – og om katalogisering

Anders Toftgaard: Mapping a collection. What the catalogue records can tell us about Otto Thott’s manuscript collection and about manuscript cataloguing.
 This article deals with the manuscript collection of Count Otto Thott (1703-1785) and with manuscript cataloguing. Otto Thott was the single greatest private book collector in the history of Denmark and of inestimable importance for the Royal Danish Library, since he bequeathed his collection of manuscripts (4154 catalogue numbers) and books printed before 1531 (6059 catalogue numbers) to the Royal Library. In the manuscript collection, the inclusion of his collection marks the division between the Old Royal Collection (GKS) and the New Royal Collection (NKS). Many of the treasures in the rare books collection come from his library, and his definition of paleotypes (books printed before 1531) has (in the 20th c.) determined the definition of the collection of post-incunabula. Otto Thott did not write owners’ marks or notes in his books and he left very little archival material concerning the ways in which he created his library. Regrettably, the literary correspondence mentioned in his will has not survived. The article analyses a data set consisting of all catalogue records (in MARC format) concerning manuscripts from Otto Thott’s manuscript collection. These catalogue records in the library system derive from the catalogue made by Rasmus Nyerup (excluding oriental manuscripts) and published in 1795. When, towards the end of the 19th centrury, the alphabetical and the systematical catalogues of the collection of western manuscripts were produced, the entries in Nyerup’s catalogue were copied by hand without being revised. After the IT revolution, when the catalogue records of the systematical catalogue were transferred to a digital database of records, these records were copied once again without revision. It is shown what kind of errors from the catalogue of 1795 were still present in the on line catalogue in 2019. The quantitative analysis shows that the bulk of the manuscripts in Thott’s manuscript collection are manuscripts in Danish and German from Thott’s own century. The subject headings with most entries are Theology, History, History of Denmark, Danish Biography and Literature. As to provenances there is information concerning the manuscript’s provenance before the inclusion in Otto Thoot’s library in 17 % of the catalogue records. The analysis shows that Otto Thott’s manuscript collection was a universal collection with no specific preferences. The conclusion argues that it is necessary to get information from the various printed catalogs of the manuscript collection into the digital library system and that parts of Thott’s manuscript collection deserve revisiting and recataloguing. The Royal Danish Library’s manuscript collection might explore alternatives to the MARC-format for manuscript cataloguing. In a wider context, it is argued that Otto Thott’s library should be considered a knot in a network, and that data from the many book auction catalogues should be extracted and used for mapping the destinies of specific books and manuscripts.

«Дама за туалетом» Джулио Романо в свете социальной истории искусства

The so called Lady at her Toilette by Giulio Romano from the Moscow Pushkin State Museumof Fine Arts has been conventionally regarded as an imitation of famous Fornarina by Raphael. Social aspectof its origins have not been explored and its function has been defined only generally as a portrait or a depiction of “courtesan” or “mistress”, the issues of its possible patron and original context have not been assessed. Close examination of Lady at her Toilette’s distinct visual details dismisses the seeming similarities with frivolous female images known as belle and reveals strong affinities with painterly wedding epithalamia, which clearly indicates its own function as a wedding painting presenting Venus bestowing blessing upon a new bride. Having established the work’s function in general, the author has attempted to define a possible patron of this wedding epithalamia. Giulio Romano’s artistic career shows his involvement in the wedding of the Duke of Mantua Federico II Gonzaga and Margherita Paleologa, which took place in 1531. As a court painter Giulio was responsible for major decorative works in the city and created, among other, the bride’s portrait (Royal Collection, Hampton Court, London). This portrait turns out to be the closest analogy to the Moscow “Lady” in terms of composition, style, painterly manner and even the facial features of the women. This, along with other similarities, unequivocally indicates that they were created as a set — as a wedding set that includes the portrait of the young spouse and an allegorical depiction of Venus.

“This Is Not Martin Luther”

“This Is Not Martin Luther” Martin J. Lohrmann For some years I have wondered about the image shown here, which has recently been featured in academic and church resources. It serves, for instance, as the cover of Martin Luther’s Basic Theological Writings, Third Edition,1 and as the picture accompanying the entry “Luther, A Biography” in The Encyclopedia of Martin Luther and the Reformation.2 It is commonly labeled in online images of Martin Luther, if it is attributed at all, as an 1833 engraving of Luther, based on a painting by King Henry VIII’s court painter Hans Holbein the Younger (1497–1543). Having seen many Luther portraits— especially paintings by Luther’s friend and collaborator Lucas Cranach the Elder—I never thought this one looked like other images of Luther from the sixteenth century. Because copies of copies invite error, I was willing to grant that some artist in the nineteenth century had simply done a bad job imitating a sixteenth-century original. However, with a little research, I discovered that the image in question was never based upon a picture of Martin Luther at all. It is, instead, a mislabeled reproduction of a Hans Holbein portrait of Bishop John Stokesley, who served as bishop of London in the 1530s. Ironically, Stokesley was himself an opponent of the “Lutheran” reforming efforts then underway in England; he remained a loyal Roman Catholic until his death in 1539. A first piece of evidence for this misattribution appears in an 1867 book entitled Some Account of the Life and Works of Hans Holbein, Painter, of Augsburg by Ralph Nicholson Wornum, who was at the time the Keeper and Secretary of the National Gallery of London. In an extended footnote, Wornum explained that the image was [End Page 434] Click for larger view View full resolution Fig. 1. Image appears in James Gardner, The Faiths of the World; An Account of All Religions and Religious Sects, Their Doctrines, Rites, Ceremonies, and Customs. Compiled from the Latest and Best Authorities, and Illustrated from Authentic and Trustworthy Authorities, Volume 2. H–Z, (London & Edinburgh: Fullarton & Co., 1858), following page 340 (Scanned from the copy at the Princeton Theological Seminary library). The original caption reads, “Luther. From the Original Picture by Holbein in Her Majesty’s Collection at Windsor.” The publication of this image in the 1850s matches this paper’s findings that the misattribution of this portrait as Luther began to be corrected by English art historians in the following decade. [End Page 435] engraved in 1833 by C.E. Wagstaff, who attached the name “Martin Luther” to it for Windsor Castle’s portrait gallery.3 Indeed, the common descriptors “1833” and “Windsor Castle” match information that online versions of the picture frequently contain. Wornum, however, dismissed the notion that Holbein ever painted Luther’s portrait and denied that Wagstaff ’s copy was an image of Luther. According to him, the image identified as “Martin Luther” was based on a Holbein-credited portrait of Bishop Stokesley. This correction appeared again in an 1869 annual survey of English culture. In a section discussing an 1868 exhibition of Holbein’s portraits, the author states, “That [portrait] of Bishop Stokesley, which was formerly at Hampton Court, under the name of ‘Martin Luther,’ is now preserved at Windsor Castle.”4 The aptness of these corrections becomes clear when one sees an original version of Holbein’s portrait of Stokesley. Because the image that is available online belongs to the Royal Collection Trust and has a copyright belonging to the Queen, it is not reproduced here; it can be viewed on the webpage given in the endnote below.5 However, as the sources from the 1860s affirmed, the likeness between the authentic sixteenth-century image of Stokesley and the mislabeled Luther of the nineteenth century is unmistakable, including facial features, cap and gown, position of the hands, and the crest in the upper-right corner. As best as I can reconstruct it, C.E. Wagstaff—a prolific engraver of the mid 1800s—was commissioned to make images of prominent historical figures for display. Wagstaff seems to have preserved a previous misattribution or himself wrongly identified Holbein’s...

Una serie de retratos de escuela francesa del Museo del Prado en relación con la colección de María Luisa de Orleans: sugerencias y precisiones.

La reina María Luisa de Orleans (1662-1689), primera esposa de Carlos II, reunió en el Alcázar de Madrid una colección de pinturas compuesta principalmente por retratos que, tras su muerte, pasaron a la colección real sin que hasta la fecha se haya se haya relacionado ninguna de esas obras con las actualmente conservadas.El artículo analiza una serie de retratos de familiares de esta reina que hoy se conservan en el Museo del Prado y se sostiene su origen en la colección de esta soberana a partir del estudio de los inventarios realizados. Igualmente se propone la identificación de algunos de los personajes representados que hasta ahora figuran como desconocidos o con otra identificación.

Beyond All Price: Victorian Hair Jewelry, Commemoration & Story-Telling

When the Rothschild Foundation and National Trust commissioned the artist Jane Wildgoose to present an exhibition at Waddesdon Manor, the country mansion built for Ferdinand de Rothschild (1839–1898) containing his magnificent collection of eighteenth-century French decorative arts and European paintings, she focused not on the grandeur of the house or the luxury of its contents, but on a simple lock of hair and a tiny photograph of Ferdinand’s wife, Evelina (1839–1866). This essay gives an account of how these humble objects held the key to a deeply personal story relating to Ferdinand and Evelina. Focusing on the materiality of human hair, and the complex codes for mourning in the late Victorian period, Wildgoose unravels some of the meanings associated with nineteenth-century mourning jewelry, including examples selected from the Rothschild collections and the Royal Collection to accompany Evelina’s hair and photograph in her exhibition Beyond All Price. It also discusses her research trip to Leila’s Hair Museum in the USA, where she learnt techniques for making wreaths from human hair in order to be able to make new pieces of hairwork for the exhibition. The essay concludes with discussion about Wildgoose’s ongoing work with donated human hair, and her associated research into the historical circumstances that led to a “unique status” being ascribed to human remains in collections, in the UK government’s Guidance for the Care of Human Remains in Museums.

Los tapices de la Escuela de Equitación en el Palacio de Dueñas de Sevilla. Los cartones de Jacob Jordaens y el origen de la serie

En este trabajo se reflexiona, en primer lugar, en el número original de cartones que Jacob Jordaens debió realizar con el tema de la Escuela de Equitación. Atendiendo a los cartones y tapices conservados de diferentes series, se hace una aproximación a las composiciones ideadas por Jordaens. En relación con estas escenas se incluyen los tapices de la colección Alba conservados actualmente en el palacio de Dueñas en Sevilla, que en su origen debió contar con doce paños. En segundo lugar, la peculiar bordura de estos tapices, con la parte baja rematada en negro, permite relacionar otros tres paños en colecciones extranjeras con los conservados en Sevilla. Esta nota singular, junto con su calidad en la ejecución de los tapices, hace plantearse su procedencia primera en alguna de las colecciones regias del siglo XVII, puesto que las primeras noticias de la serie de Sevilla se fechan a principios del siglo XVIII.

Exhibition: Charles I — King and Collector

Royal Academy of Arts, London , 27 January 2018 to 15 April 2018 This majestic exhibition contains many wonders, and is well worth a visit. Per Rumberg, curator at the Royal Academy of Arts, and Desmond Shawe-Taylor, surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures, have done a fantastic job in bringing together about 150 canvases that formed part of the royal collection of Charles I in the early 17th century. Many have come to London from the Museo del Prado and the Louvre for the first time; many more are from the Queen’s Collection. The story began in 1623 when Charles travelled to Madrid in an ill-fated attempt to explore the possibility of marriage to the Infanta Maria Anna of Spain. He came home without a wife, but with some Titians and a Veronese, and a determination to collect works of art that would rival the splendours of the Italian Renaissance masterpieces he had seen in the Spanish court. He was crowned king …

From a royal residence to a royal collection: the state apartments at Hampton Court Palace, 1737–1838

From a royal residence to a royal collection: the state apartments at Hampton Court Palace, 1737–1838

The Royal Provenance and Tudor Courtly Reading of a Wycliffite Bible

This analysis of Cambridge University Library, MS Mm.2.15 indicates some ways in which the English Bible may have been read by social elites during the mid-Tudor period. The presence of the Cambridge manuscript within the royal collection followed a precedent set by several of Edward VI's predecessors, who owned manuscript copies of the Wycliffite Bible. The exclusive status of the Middle English scriptural text changed after printed English bibles became more available, beginning with William Tyndale's New Testament edition in 1526. Despite this proliferation of printed versions of the Bible in English, however, the Cambridge manuscript indicates that privileged readers showed a readiness to adapt older manuscript copies of the text for their use.

Greatness in failure: a look at Leonardo da Vinci and his drawings of the heart

Greatness in failure: a look at Leonardo da Vinci and his drawings of the heart

From the Royal Castle to school. King Stanisław August’s legacy and the Volhynian Gymnasium collections

The library and the cabinet collections of King of Poland Stanisław August Poniatowski reflect the trends of the Enlightement as well as the monarch’s interests. Their acquisition by one of the most important Polish schools, the Volhynian Gymnasium in Kremenets, saved them from dismemberment and gave rise to school collections. The acquisition was possible owing to history (the Partition of Poland, and the emergence of the Vilna Educational District) and a unique man – Tadeusz Czacki.The collections at the Volhynian Gymnasium in Kremenets was open to the public on a daily basis. In this way, the Polish King’s Stanisław August wish to have the collection available for masses came true, after his death regrettably. School collections were very valuable. Having originated from the royal collection of the last Polish King, they became a reminiscence of the national potential of a country that disappeared from the map of Europe in 1795.This article is a part of a future book and an attempt of documenting the transition of respective collections from the royal residence in Warsaw to Kremenets. The analysis of Polish, Lithuanian and Ukrainian archives enables to reconstruct the history of the royal collections and to show their quality and didactic utility.

The Rise and Fall of Cork Model Collections in Britain

AbstractCommencing in the late 1760s, cork models of classical monuments in Italy were purchased by wealthy British collectors while on their Grand Tour. Initially commissioned by tourists with specific antiquarian and architectural interests, the models were an expression of the collector's knowledge of classical history and of their Neoclassical sensibility. Models soon appeared in the Society of Antiquaries of London and the British Museum, in the private displays of Charles Townley and John Stuart, Earl of Bute, and in George III's royal collection. In the early 1800s, architect John Soane began purchasing models from the secondary market for his house museum. Interest in cork architectural models waned during the Nineteenth Century. Descendants of the original owners transferred them to public institutions, while museums that had at first enthusiastically welcomed the donations or made their own purchases, relegated the models to storage. In the twentieth century the majority of the models were discarded or lost. This paper explores the reasons for the enthusiastic acquisition of architectural cork models and their subsequent demise.

The Attribution of Works of Russian Stonecutting Factories: Object, Design, and Issues of Authorship in the Context of Cross-Cultural Exchange

This article focuses on the study of the decorative and applied art of the 19 th century — the issue of attribution of authorship in the conditions of borrowing and transfer of taste, active cross-cultural contacts, the cosmopolitan art of the neostyle period, and the establishment of the industrial reproduction of decorative objects based on the principle of replication of a sample. This paper considers a specific source of borrowing (L’art industriel, an engraved album of Leon Feuchère’s drawings, 1839) and the interpretation of three samples from this illustrated edition by Russian masters of stonecutting of the second half of the 19 th century. The authors compare the approach towards the original in the works of the Malachite factory of the Demidov family (1847–1851) and the Imperial Kolyvan Polishing Factory, carried out in the 1870s according to the designs of Ivan A. Zlobin. The pieces of art analysed in this article are kept in the Royal Collection of Great Britain (for the first time in history, the authors provide information about two works of Russian masters in the collection), in the Mineralogical Museum of Alexander E. Fersman of the Russian Academy of Sciences (Moscow), and Hotêl de Ville (Paris). Additionally, the authors consider sources from the library of Institut national de l’histoire de l’art (Paris, Doucet collection) and the collection of the Ministry of the Imperial Court of the Russian State Historical Archive (St Petersburg). Having analysed the aforementioned sources and compared them with graphic prototypes, the authors conclude that it is necessary to complete the existing attribution of the authors of stonecutting works with data about the original artworks. Referring to particular examples, the authors prove that it is impossible to only rely on a narrowly national approach to the history of Russian stonecutting art and that this art should be studied in the European context.

From France to Saxony – Painted pebbles from Le Mas d’Azil (Ariège) in the archaeological collections from Saxony

This contribution presents about 30 painted pebbles from Le Mas d’Azil which have been recently detected in the Staatliches Museum für Archäologie à Chemnitz (Germany). This study retraces the history of these pieces since their discovery at the site and demonstrates that they have been directly donated, in 1899, by the excavator Édouard Piette to the royal collection of prehistory at Dresden. The identification of their origin makes it unlikely that they represent forgeries and offer an important addendum to the existing inventory of these emblematic pieces of French prehistory.

Curating the Royal Collection at Hampton Court Palace in the nineteenth century

Curating the Royal Collection at Hampton Court Palace in the nineteenth century

Selling Authenticity in the Bamum Kingdom in 1929–1930

In February 1930, Eugene Pittard, the director of the ethnological museum in Geneva, sought to expand his museum’s collections in an unusual manner. Instead of sponsoring an expedition to Africa or acquiring objects from former missionaries, instead of buying from established dealers in ethnographic specimens or the newer galleries that specialized in l’art negre, Pittard wrote to an African man in Africa, a Bamum man named Mose Yeyap (Pittard 1930) (Fig. 1).1 Yeyap was the head of the relatively new artisanat in Foumban, a school and artists’ cooperative founded in 1927, and he was known as a key figure for collectors seeking to acquire works of art from the Bamum kingdom. Pittard’s letter explained that he “would like to assemble ... as true a picture as possible of the population of which you are a part, that is to say of the material life of this population. I am sending you by the same post [a list of] the kinds of things that would be the most interesting to have” (Pittard 1930). Pittard explained pointedly, “I insist on one point: Our intent is to have the oldest objects; those which have not been subjected to European influence.” He then listed for Yeyap the kinds of objects he had in mind: “sculpted wood masks, statues, sculpted horns, etc. ... sculpted drums with carved animals or other designs. Miss Debarge [a physician known both to Pittard and Yeyap] showed me drawings on paper that you made of sculptures. Is it possible to have these sculptures themselves?” (Pittard 1930). Pittard’s letter, of course, epitomizes how European arrogance and fantasy informed the collection of African art in the first decades of the twentieth century. Pittard condescendingly and absurdly schooled Yeyap about Yeyap’s own culture and, by privileging his desire for “the oldest objects,” those supposedly untouched by “European influence,” Pittard revealed his adherence to the chimerical “ideal” of African cultures as isolated in time and space. In a fascinating twist, however, we also have Yeyap’s response to Pittard. Yeyap answered back:

Les monnaies de Phalsbourg et Lixheim conservées à la BnF : un héritage de la collection royale

The coins of Henriette de Lorraine (1633-1634), princess of Phalsbourg and Lixheim, preserved in the Cabinet des Médailles of the BnF were inventoried in 1846 and 1862 without any regard to their origin. Further catalogues, from 1865 through 2002, let the question aside. Besides, these issues were not related to monetary ordinances that cried several of them down at that time. In fact five silver and billon issues have been found mentioned in the ancient inventories of the royal collection as well as other informations in the documents bequeathed by Morel-Fatio to the Cabinet in 1887. These discoveries allow now to present an updated catalogue of the issues, respecting the types of monetary imitations decreed by this princess.