Tag Archives: Leonardo Da Vinci

Reviews: ‘The Week In Art’

The Week In Art Podcast (December 6, 2024): The Art Newspaper’s editor, Americas, Ben Sutton, and our art market editor, Kabir Jhala, are in Florida and report on the sales and the mood on the first VIP day at Art Basel Miami Beach.

On 8 December, the cathedral of Notre-Dame in Paris will reopen, more than five years after the fire that partly destroyed it. Ben Luke talks to one of the architects responsible for its rise from the ashes, Pascal Prunet. And this episode’s Work of the Week is The Madonna and Child with Saints (1526-27) by Parmigianino, better known as The Vision of Saint Jerome.

The painting this week returned to public display for the first time in 10 years, in a new exhibition at the National Gallery in London, following conservation, and we talk to Maria Alambritis, the show’s co-curator.

Art Basel Miami Beach, until Sunday, 8 December.

Notre-Dame reopens on Sunday, 8 December.

Parmigianino: The Vision of Saint Jerome, National Gallery, London, until 9 March 2025

Arts: Leonardo da Vinci – “Anatomical Studies”

PBS (November 29, 2024): Leonardo da Vinci believed extensive knowledge of human anatomy was essential to depicting the human form.

Since medical teachings were inadequate, he began a meticulous study of his own – and he didn’t stop at the surface. He also drew muscles, bones, and organs, and experimented with different techniques. He even studied ancient sources, which led to his famous depiction of The Vitruvian Man.

Reviews: ‘The Week In Art’

The Week In Art Podcast (November 15, 2024): UK museums are at a moment of transformation with a new generation of directors taking the helm at several of the major national institutions in London. So for this landmark 300th episode, we felt it was a good moment to look at the challenges and opportunities for museums now and in the future.

We invited Gus Casely-Hayford of V&A East, Nicholas Cullinan of the British Museum and Karin Hindsbo of Tate Modern to join our host Ben Luke for a wide-ranging discussion.

Reviews: ‘The Week In Art’

The Week In Art Podcast (November 8, 2024): This week: two exhibitions in London are showing remarkable works made during the Renaissance. At the King’s Gallery, the museum that is part of Buckingham Palace, Drawing the Italian Renaissance offers a thematic journey through 160 works on paper made across Italy between 1450 and 1600.

Ben Luke talks to Martin Clayton, Head of Prints and Drawings at the Royal Collection Trust, about the show. At the Royal Academy, meanwhile, the timescale is much tighter: a single year, 1504 to be precise, when Michelangelo, Leonardo and Raphael were all in Florence. We talk to Julien Domercq, a curator at the Academy, about this remarkable crucible of creativity.

And this episode’s Work of the Week is a magnum opus of Renaissance textiles: the Battle of Pavia Tapestries, made in Brussels to designs by Bernard van Orley, and currently on view in an exhibition at the de Young Museum in San Francisco. Thomas Campbell, the director of Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, talks to The Art Newspaper’s associate digital editor, Alexander Morrison, about the series.

Drawing the Italian Renaissance, King’s Gallery, Buckingham Palace, London, until 9 March 2025

Michelangelo, Leonardo, Raphael: Florence, c.1504, Royal Academy of Arts, London, 9 November-16 February 2025

Art and War in the Renaissance: The Battle of Pavia Tapestries, de Young Museum, San Francisco, US, until 12 January; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas, spring 2025

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Previews: ‘Leonardo da Vinci’ – A Film By Ken Burns

CBS Sunday Morning (October 27, 2024): Acclaimed filmmaker Ken Burns, renowned for his documentaries on such topics as the Civil War, baseball, jazz and the Statue of Liberty, has now focused on 15th century Italian artist and intellectual Leonardo da Vinci.

Correspondent David Pogue talks with Burns and his producing partners, daughter Sarah Burns and son-in-law David McMahon, about their PBS documentary on the man Burns calls “one of the most incredibly interesting human beings who has ever walked the Earth.”

Reviews: ‘The Week In Art’

The Week In Art Podcast (June 14, 2024): This week: it’s arguably the best loved of the major art fairs among collectors and dealers, but what have we learned about the art market at this year’s Art Basel, in its original Swiss home?

The Art Newspaper’s acting art market editor, Tim Schneider, tells us about the big sales in Switzerland amid the wider market picture. The journalist Lynn Barber has a new book out, called A Little Art Education, in which she reflects on her encounters with artists from Salvador Dalí to Tracey Emin. We talk to her about the highs and lows of several decades of artist interviews.

And this episode’s Work of the Week is Woman Leaning on a Portfolio (1799) by Guillaume Lethière. Lethiére was born in Guadeloupe in the Caribbean to a plantation-owner father and an enslaved mother, but eventually became one of the most notable painters of his period in France and beyond. We talk to Esther Bell and Olivier Meslay, the curators of a major survey of Lethière’s work opening this week at the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts, US, and travelling later in the year to the Louvre in Paris.

Art Basel, Basel, Switzerland, until Sunday, 16 June.

A Little Art Education by Lynn Barber, Cheerio, £15 (hb).

Reviews: ‘The Week In Art’

The Week In Art Podcast (June 7, 2024): This week: we explore the Art Institute of Chicago’s exhibition dedicated to what Georgia O’Keeffe called her New Yorks—paintings of skyscrapers and views from one of them across the East River, which marked a turning point in her career.

Sarah Kelly Oehler, one of the curators of the show, tells us more. One of the most distinctive of all London’s contemporary art spaces, Studio Voltaire, is celebrating its 30th anniversary this year, and has begun a fundraising drive to consolidate its future, with a gala dinner this week and a Christie’s auction later this month. We talk to the chair of Studio Voltaire’s trustees and a non-executive director of Frieze, Victoria Siddall, about the anniversary and the precarious funding landscape, even for the UK’s most dynamic non-profits.

And this episode’s Work of the Week is an untitled painting from the Austrian painter Martha Jungwirth’s 2022 series Francisco de Goya, Still Life with Ribs and Lamb’s Head. Based on a work by the Spanish master in the Louvre in Paris, Jungwirth’s painting features in a new survey of her work that has just opened at the Guggenheim Bilbao in Spain. We speak to its curator, Lekha Hileman Waitoller.

Georgia O’Keeffe: My New Yorks, Art Institute of Chicago, until 22 September; High Museum of Art, Atlanta, from 25 October-16 February 2025.

The date of XXX, as the sale of works to benefit Studio Voltaire at Christie’s is called, is yet to be confirmed. Check the organisations’ websites for updates; Beryl Cook/Tom of Finland, Studio Voltaire, London, until 25 August.

Martha Jungwirth, Guggenheim Bilbao, until 22 September.

Reviews: ‘The Week In Art’

The Week In Art Podcast (May 31, 2024): The publication in April of Stanford University’s Artificial Intelligence Index Annual Report has provided the art world with much food for thought.

We look at the implications for artists and institutions with Louis Jebb, the managing editor of The Art Newspaper and our technology specialist. As the Centre Pompidou in Paris is taken over on all its floors by what it calls the “ninth art”—graphic novels and comics—we talk to Joel Meadows, the editor-in-chief of Tripwire magazine and a comics aficionado, about the rise of this subculture in museums and the market. And this episode’s Work of the Week is Edgar Degas’ Miss La La at the Cirque Fernando (1879), which depicts a Black circus performer, Anna Albertine Olga Brown, who was briefly known as Miss La La.

She and the painting are the subject of a new exhibition at the National Gallery in London opening next week. We talk to Anne Robbins, the curator of paintings at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, and external curator of the exhibition, and Sterre Overmars, the curatorial fellow for post-1800 paintings at the National Gallery, about the painting.

Comics on Every Floor, Centre Pompidou, Paris, until 4 November.

Discover Degas & Miss La La, National Gallery, London, 6 June-1 September.

Reviews: ‘The Week In Art’

The Week In Art Podcast (May 24, 2024): As the Louvre’s director admits that the Paris museum wants to move its most famous painting away from the crowded gallery in which it is currently displayed, we ask the Leonardo specialist Martin Kemp: does the museum have a Mona Lisa problem?

We also talk about the painting’s continuing allure and the ongoing efforts to explain its mysteries. In London, remarkably, Judy Chicago has just opened her first major multidisciplinary survey in a British public gallery, at the Serpentine North. We talk to her about the show. And this episode’s Work of the Week is Christian Schad’s Self-Portrait with Model (1927). The painting features in Splendour and Misery: New Objectivity in Germany at the Leopold Museum in Vienna. Hans-Peter Wipplinger, the director of the museum and co-curator of the show, tells us more.

Judy Chicago: Revelations, Serpentine North, London, until 1 September.

Splendour and Misery: New Objectivity in Germany, Leopold Museum, Vienna, until 29 September.

Culture: The American Scholar – Summer 2023

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THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR SUMMER 2023 issue: What does Antoni van Leeuwenhoek have to do with Covid? Can a digital restoration of a supposed da Vinci be just as good as the real thing? What was it like to be a young journalist on one of François Truffaut’s sets?

A Kingdom of Little Animals

Antoni van Leeuwenhoek, in a circa 1680 painting by the Dutch artist Jan Verkolje, famous for his portraits of prominent members of Delft society (Wikimedia Commons)
Antoni van Leeuwenhoek, in a circa 1680 painting by the Dutch artist Jan Verkolje, famous for his portraits of prominent members of Delft society

Antoni van Leeuwenhoek’s discovery of microorganisms made possible the revolutionary advances in biology and medicine that continue to inform our Covid age

By Laura J. Snyder

One night in 1677, a grizzled man in a wrinkled linen nightshirt rushed from his bemused wife’s bed with a candle in hand to examine the “remains of conjugal coitus, immediately after ejaculation before six beats of the pulse.” Using the candle to cast a pool of light in his dark study, he put a drop of the liquid into a tiny glass vial he had blown himself, attaching it to the back of a strange-looking device he had also constructed. 

The Whole World in His Hands

The Salvator Mundi in its damaged state—cleaned but not yet restored (Wikimedia Commons)

What a digital restoration of the most expensive painting ever sold tells us about beauty, authenticity, and the fragility of existence

I got the call late on a summer afternoon. Yanai Segal, an artist I’ve known for years, asked me whether I’d heard of the Salvator Mundi—the painting attributed to Leonardo da Vinci that was lost for more than two centuries before resurfacing in New Orleans in 2005. I told him that I’d heard something of the story but that I didn’t remember the details. He had recently undertaken a project related to the painting, he said, and wanted to tell me about it. I was eager to hear more, but first I needed to remind myself of the basic facts. We agreed to speak again soon.