Music iconography
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Finally, the Master of the Roman Songbook
I am so glad the proceedings of the 2019 RKD Symposium Going South have been published today. Chapter 8 looks into the oeuvre of this unknown artist we have given the name of Master of the Roman songbook. There is a long list of people I have to thank for this piece. First and foremost,…
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RKD Studies: Going South
The proceedings of the 2019 symposium Going South : Artistic Exchange Between the Low Countries and Italy are about to be published. Chapter 8 is my paper on the Master of the Roman Songbook. Stay tuned for the official publication here: https://rkdstudies.nl/all-rkd-studies/
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A detail
It’s been a while since my last post, but things get a bit complicated with motherhood. Anyways, it has come to my attention today a beautiful drawing held at the Cabinet du Dessins du Louvre, namely inv 34508, Recto by Louis Tocqué (1696-1772), a very refined portrait painter. This drawing is titled Etude de main…
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Trevisani reworked
The above drawing is for sale at Bubb Kuyper’s 75 upcoming auction as lot 5120. It is presented as Anonymous from the late 17th to- beginning of the 18th century. As the images below show, it is a sketch inspired by the frontispiece to the Opus VI by Arcangelo Corelli. Francesco Trevisani, an artist and…
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A “walking man” that has lost his “cello”.
Here is a wonderful sculpture at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam (inv. BK-16083): it represents a walking man with a raised left arm and the right protrunding outwards. The description of the item in the museum’s website reads: De man staat met het linkerbeen voor het rechter, met even naar buiten gedraaide voet. De rechterarm houdt…
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The theorbist
Among the Niemeijer pictures there was this stunning drawing by a non specified Bolognese artist from the 17th century. Striking are the details of the hands, especially the one striking the strings, in the middle. Pure visual delight. It is now included in the ICONCLASS boxes at the RKD.
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Cucù Couchet! / (Peekaboo Couchet!)
Besides collecting pictures of musical instruments and performances, Dr. J.W. Niemeijer amassed a reasonable amount of portraits of composers, musicians and more in general people related to music. A striking one is the supposed-to-be portrait of Johannes Couchet (1610-1655)* Flemish harpsichord maker active in Antwerp within the school of the Ruckers family. The RKDexplore database…
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“Zen and the Art of Lute Maintenance”
Among the images collected by J.W. Niemeijer there is a stunning portrait of an unknown man stringing a lute. According to the inscription the artist’s name is also obscure, however, he might have been active in Northern Italy in the 1520s. Great care was dedicated to the depiction of the tools in the foreground. Particularly…
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A print and a drawing after Bononi at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam
While browsing through the digital collection of the Rijksmuseum, I ran into two reproductions of a painting I was supposed to see in real life last year, namely the Genius of the Arts by Carlo Bononi (1569-1632) that was exposed in Ferrara at Palazzo dei Diamanti in a beautiful and rare monographic exhibition (14.10.2017-07.01.2018). A…
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(pieces of) Italian Music Iconography on show…
During my last trip to Italy I visited local collections – namely in Venice the Gallerie dell’Accademia and the Palazzo Cini Galleria, in Vicenza the Gallerie di Palazzo Chiericati, Villa Valmarana ai Nani with an incursion in the small Oratorio di St. Chiara, in Verona in the Museo di Castelvecchio – and this is a…
Anna Bianco 