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 …

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 …

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 …

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. …