Volume 86, Issue 1

In two exceptional drawings, the Netherlandish artist Lambert Lombard responded to the famous studies of Christ’s Passion that Michelangelo produced as gifts for the Roman noblewoman Vittoria Colonna between circa 1538 and 1541. This article investigates the nature of the drawing as gift in the work of both artists, with respect to practices of giving, reciprocity, and the gift of talent. In the context of his participation in the circle around the embattled English cardinal Reginald Pole, Lombard’s drawings engage with the theological and artistic significance of Michelangelo’s studies, particularly in their depiction of salvation as a gift beyond recompense. Lombard’s response to Michelangelo reflects his position as a northern European artist working in a period of intense crisis about the function of art in systems of belief.

In 1559 Cosimo I de’ Medici commissioned eight tapestries on the subject The Life of Man . These tapestries were destined for the room in the Palazzo Vecchio where Cosimo and his family dined during the winter season. Giorgio Vasari designed the series and Jan van der Straet was responsible for its cartoons; the tapestries were woven by Benedetto di Michele Squilli and Giovanni di Bastiano Sconditi. Until now three tapestries of the series are known to have been preserved. In this article I shall argue that a fourth tapestry can now be added to these three. I will also reconstruct the original appearance of the full series on The Life of Man and put forth a hypothesis as to the purpose it may have served in its original setting.

Blue paper was probably the most common substrate onto which pastels were painted during the eighteenth century. Nevertheless, the associated implications have not yet been researched comprehensively. Based on case studies and contemporary source documents as well as in cooperation with conservators from international collections, this article argues for incorporating the supposedly invisible into art historical analyses. The aim is also to question both the categorisation of pastel painting as drawing and its assumed “sweet” aesthetics in order to open our eyes to the versatility of pastel painting. Through an art-theoretical discussion of underlying materials and the dissecting gaze, the article reflects on artificiality, illusionism, verisimilitude, and the subjectified view.

The painter Vija Celmins has long been an outlier in narratives of postwar American art. Extensive formal analysis of her work, from her early still lifes to her later night skies and ocean surfaces, shows that Celmins was deeply invested in the issues of time, entropy, and energy that proved crucial to her contemporaries, like Robert Smithson and Hans Haacke. However, Celmins found ways of objectifying energy through naturalistic representation and the most traditional of media, painting and drawing. She explores these issues by discovering contradictions within classical mimesis.