From Nicola di Maestro Antonio to Carlo Crivelli and back again

by Amanda Hilliam The only article dedicated to the Venetian painter Carlo Crivelli (c.1430/5 – c.1494) ever to appear in The Burlington Magazine was published in March 1913.[1] The attribution to Crivelli of a newly-discovered Madonna and Child (fig.1)., which had recently passed from Duveen Brothers to the Philip Lehman collection in New York, was …

‘Caravaggiomania’ in The Burlington Magazine – Part I: the late 20th century

by Noti Klagka This post explores the scholarship on Michelangelo da Caravaggio in the pages of The Burlington Magazine and reveals the crucial role played by the Magazine in the critical reception of this artist. Caravaggio has definitely been the most popular 17th century Italian artist published in the Burlington: 59 main articles and 210 …

‘The Labours of the Months’ (1923): Herbert Read’s first article for The Burlington Magazine

Surrealist poet, war hero, militant anarchist, art critic and Editor of The Burlington Magazine from 1933 to 1938. Herbert Read, the son of a Yorkshire farmer who became one of the country’s most influential writers, is an intellectual figure who looms large in British history and about whom much has been written. Recently, art historian …

Margaret Jourdain and The Burlington Magazine

In June 1903, when the Burlington Magazine was only 3 months old, it published a detailed article on the lace collection of Mabel Chermside, ‘Mrs. Alfred Morrison’. This was a detailed and richly illustrated account, which distinguished different kinds of laces, stiches and points. The article was a perfect example of the new art historical …

A fascination for the archive: Herbert Horne, Aby Warburg and The Burlington Magazine in the early 20th century

Aby Warburg (1866-1929) was a German-Jewish scholar whose research was focused on iconography, on the legacy of the classical world and on the transmission of classical representation through to the Renaissance. Warburg left a relatively small corpus of writings in German and he did not write anything for the Burlington. He may, therefore, appear to …

‘Things of beauty, Joys for ever’: The Connoisseur Magazine 1901-1951

The Connoisseur (originally subtitled ‘An Illustrated Magazine for Collectors’) was born in September 1901. It survived nearly the entire course of the twentieth century, before passing away in February 1992. It was a British magazine, but it was also published in America. As the first editor acknowledged in the first edition, a magazine ‘devoted to …

Charles Ricketts as art critic for The Burlington Magazine

Between 1904 and 1909 Charles Ricketts wrote twenty articles for The Burlington Magazine. He began in June 1904 with a brief, dismissive review of a book on Velazquez by W. Wilberforce and A.R. Gilbert, to conclude in 1909 with a long eulogy in memory of his recently deceased friend, the painter Charles Conder. These two …

More about Mary Berenson

While there is much material on Bernard Berenson, works by his wife Mary are less known. Even if the interest in her work is growing, few scholars have tackled the questions that stem from an analysis of her writings. In first instance her work is difficult to reconstruct in its entirety, as it is either …

Pan-Giorgionism: Herbert Frederick Cook (1868-1939) as art writer.

Even in a period of fluid professional boundaries and fast moving social change the life and work of Herbert Cook appear enormously productive, if somehow difficult to narrate in a linear manner. Cook is first and foremost, as Andrea Geddes Poole demonstrated, an excellent example of upward mobility in Britain in the early 20th century: …

Connoisseurship as ‘the art-element in art’: three unknown articles by Mary Berenson in the Burlington Magazine (1903)

Numerous articles in the early years of the Burlington were unsigned or merely initialled. For example in the first March 1903 issue of the Burlington five articles out of fifteen were anonymous. Authors were not explicitly mentioned in the case of ‘in-house’ pieces, either written by the Editors themselves or intialled by members of the …