Texture, Colour and Light: Francesco Noletti (c. 1611–1654)
Francesco Noletti, Still Life with Armour, c. 1650, oil on canvas, 76 × 108 cm, Museo Correr, Venice, inv. Cl. I no. 1049. Image: Didier Descouens, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0. The Painted Carpet In 1662, the Flemish writer Cornelis de Bie related a story about a pope visiting the house of Francesco Noletti, the…
Andrea Belvedere (c. 1652–1732): Between Naturalism and Lusso Floreale.
Andrea Belvedere was born in Naples around 1652 and became one of the most accomplished flower painters of the later seventeenth century. His career belonged to a particularly rich moment in Neapolitan still life. By the time he began to work, painters such as Paolo Porpora, Giuseppe Recco and Giovan Battista Ruoppolo had already established…
Andrea del Sarto and the Pala di Gambassi: Painting, Friendship and Patronage
A late altarpiece Andrea del Sarto’s Madonna and Child with Saints Onofrio, Lawrence, John the Baptist, Mary Magdalene, Roch and Sebastian, generally known as the Pala di Gambassi, belongs to the last years of a career that had placed him at the centre of Florentine painting. Now in the Galleria Palatina at Palazzo Pitti, the…
Games, Music and Light: Mattia Preti in Rome
Three secular paintings by Mattia Preti, all generally assigned to his early Roman career in the first half of the 1630s, form a closely related group. Both A Concert, c. 1630–35, now in the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid, and the Concert in the State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg, generally dated to the early or mid-1630s,…
Leonardo and Isabella d’Este: The Life of a Drawing
Isabella d’Este and Leonardo Isabella d’Este was born in Ferrara in 1474, the daughter of Ercole I d’Este and Eleonora d’Aragona, and in 1490 married Francesco II Gonzaga, marquis of Mantua. Her position at the Mantuan court involved political as well as dynastic responsibilities, while her collecting and patronage brought her into sustained contact with…
The Depth of the Surface: Vittorio Corcos (1859–1933) and the Art of Appearance
Formation and the vero Vittorio Corcos enrolled at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence in November 1875 and progressed with conspicuous ease. Admitted directly to Enrico Pollastrini’s drawing course, he passed his examinations and, in 1876–77, received a silver medal for a figure study copied dal vero. Despite this success, he soon became dissatisfied…
Giovanna Carolina Carlesimo / Juana Romani (1867–1923): Art, Identity and Self-Fashioning between Italy and Paris
Juana Romani, La fille de Théodora (A Dark-Haired Beauty), 1898, oil on panel, 81.3 × 63.8 cm, current location unknown. Image: Wikimedia Commons, public domain. Origins and migration Juana Romani was born Giovanna Carolina Carlesimo in Velletri on 30 April 1867, in circumstances far removed from the Parisian art world in which she would later…
Diana Di Rosa (1602–1643): An Emerging Artistic Identity
Introduction Diana Di Rosa occupies an unusual position in the history of seventeenth-century Neapolitan painting. Celebrated in later tradition as “Annella di Massimo”, she acquired a reputation that rested as much on the dramatic story of her life as on the paintings associated with her. Yet while Artemisia Gentileschi has generated an extensive modern literature,…
Hidden in Plain Sight VI. Inside the Pontano Chapel
Pisanello, studies for the obverse and reverse of four medals of Alfonso V of Aragon, 1449. Pen and brown ink with ochre wash over metalpoint. Musée du Louvre, Paris, inv. 2317. Image: Wikimedia Commons / Musée du Louvre, Département des Arts Graphiques. The interior as a different kind of text The inscriptions on the exterior…
Hidden in Plain Sight V. The Pontano Chapel: The Counsel of Stone — The Twelve Exterior Inscriptions
Pontano Chapel, Naples, exterior, 1490–92. Photograph: Miguel Hermoso Cuesta. Credit: Wikimedia Commons. Reading the inscriptions For convenience, the discussion follows the tablets from the façade along Via dei Tribunali and then around onto the side facing Piazzetta Pietrasanta, beside the campanile of Santa Maria Maggiore alla Pietrasanta. This corresponds to one natural route of approach…
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