Pontormo, Brexit and the National Gallery

by Noti Klagka and Barbara Pezzini The sale of Jacopo Pontormo’s Portrait of a Young Man in Black (illustrated here) has been recently made popular by the British press, which described it as a potentially lost national treasure and a victim of the consequences of Brexit. Its vicissitudes have also been narrated in a Burlington …

Francis Howard (1874-1954) and the ‘other’ Grosvenor Gallery (founded 1912)

Given names of art galleries are very important. They may refer to their holdings (the Spanish Gallery, that dealt in old masters from this country), their geographical location (the Sackville Gallery, in Sackville Street), or hint to some culturally shared concept (the Carfax Gallery, founded by Oxford university students, who referred to a monument in …

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 …

Sense and Sensibility: Roger Fry on Caravaggio and Futurism

In October 1922, Roger Fry published in The Burlington Magazine an article-review on seventeenth century art and architecture entitled, in error, ‘Settecentismo’.[1] The article was a vigorous attack against the art of this period, it focused mainly on Caravaggio and those who, according to Fry, ‘went a- whoring, following the new idol.’[2] Fry’s text, although …

Love and Connoisseurship: a cautionary tale

In January 1908 Robert Ross - art critic, dealer and contributor to The Burlington Magazine - published in the Academy and Literature a short story dedicated to Herbert Horne entitled 'The Hootawa Van Dyck, An Old Master’s tragedy', later republished in 1909 in his collected writings Masques & Phases. This story, that takes place in …

The Sackville Gallery – Old Masters and Avant-Garde in London

The Sackville Gallery was founded in 1908 by critic-dealers Max Rothschild and Robert Rene Meyer-Sée. In 1911 Rothschild and Meyer-Sée were joined by the Parisian critic Gilbert de Rorthays. In the same year, the Sackville Gallery began a business agreement with another critic-dealer based in Paris, Robert Dell. In 1912 Rorthays and Meyer-Sée left to …

A rare photograph of Leonardo da Vinci’s Benois Madonna

In the early twentieth century, many new attributions to Leonardo da Vinci were first presented to the international art historical community from the pages of The Burlington Magazine. When in 1909 a Virgin with Child attributed to Leonardo was exhibited from the Madame Leon Benois collection in Saint Petersburg, a debate about its authorship ensued. …