Band 85, Heft 1

Six of the twenty books of Thomas of Cantimpré’s thirteenth-century Liber de natura rerum are devoted to zoology, and two of them contain descriptions of strange sea animals whose names are often hard to make sense of, both etymologically and semantically. Illuminators had to work with textual descriptions lacking essential information, and in many cases the encyplopedist himself made matters worse by focussing on the most bizarre and peculiar traits of animals encountered in his antique and medieval sources. Consequently, some of the illuminators produced images fanciful enough to make it look like they got carried away by their own imagination. However, a detailed comparison between text and image reveals that artists did their best to follow textual descriptions – it is the literal interpretation of their sources that often strikes us as unexpected and perplexing.

How do you conceal politically critical thinking in papal Rome around 1600? Caravaggio’s Taking of Christ isn’t quite what it seems once its subversive meaning is deciphered. The painter places himself among the traitors by holding the lantern, or rather the brush. This self-portrait, I will argue, shows his critical position toward the potential of painting itself. My essay thus proposes a new reading: In the light of a new pictorial source as well as new textual material, Caravaggio appears as an artist highly sceptical of the Catholic cult of images, indeed as a painter who delivers something of a self-referential accusation of painting.

The archive of the Diotallevi family preserves a folder of unpublished letters concerning the purchase of the so-called Diotallevi Madonna by Raphael and a Nativity by Bernardino Luini for the Berlin Gemäldegalerie, which in the Diotallevi collection had been misattributed to Perugino and Garofalo, respectively. The correspondence between the art collector Audiface Diotallevi and Gustav Friedrich Waagen, director of the Berlin museum, documents protracted negotiations during which both buyer and seller politely bargained for advantage. Whilst Diotallevi was keen to bolster the reputation of his collection by the prestigious sale of the two paintings to the Berlin museum, Waagen did his best not to reveal his belief in Raphael’s authorship of the Diotallevi Madonna . The two paintings, reserved for Waagen since December 1841, eventually left Rimini in April 1842, and were sent to Berlin via Rome.

The Houses of Parliament in London (1835–1860) and the Parliament in Budapest (1885– 1902) are related in many ways. It was due to former Prime Minister Gyula Andrássy’s personal commitment that a riverside site and the Neo-Gothic style were selected for the Hungarian edifice. While the New Palace of Westminster represents the late-medieval English variant of the Gothic style, its Hungarian counterpart is an amalgamation of various Gothic features marshalled into a heterogeneous synthesis. Inevitably the issue of a national style emerged, as well as the representation of royalty on the exterior and in the interior of the building. The Parliament in Budapest was meant tobe a national monument and project the (illusive) image of a Hungary on equal footing with the world’s major countries.