Parish church discovers its painting of Last Supper linked to Titian

A vast painting of The Last Supper that has hung in a parish church in Herefordshire since the turn of the last century is being seen in a new light following the discovery of crucial evidence that links it to the workshop of Titian, one of the 16th-century’s greatest masters.  

A 12.5-foot-long painting in St Michael and All Angels church in Ledbury, was long assumed to be a much later copy. Hanging high on a wall, in a dark and dirty state, its potential had been missed. 

Ronald Moore, a conservator and art historian, removed centuries of discoloured varnish and was astonished to discover Titian’s inscribed name, a bold under-drawing worthy of Titian himself and an apostle that must be a portrait of him as the facial features precisely match his self-portrait.

In a three-year study, he linked it to a 1775 letter in which its former owner, John Skippe, an Oxford-educated artist and noted collector, wrote of buying “a most capital and well-preserved picture by Titian” from a wealthy Venetian family, adding that it was commissioned by a Venetian convent. It was donated to the Ledbury church in 1909 by one of Skippe’s descendants.

“It’s so big and nobody’s taken any notice of it for 110 years,” Mr Moore said. “Anything coming from Titian’s workshop is very important indeed.”

Read the rest here.

Portraits by George Romney (1734-1802)

A walk through the 18th century via the paintings of Bernardo Bellotto

1519-2019: Art Through Time - 500 Years of Portraits

$450 Million

I really hope that whoever just dropped all that bank on a painting gets their big tax cut for Christmas. After all, society has a duty to support billionaire art collectors.

Quote of the day...

"It is more or less incontestable that the artistic production of mediaeval and renaissance Florence, with a population a seventh of contemporary Akron, Ohio, or a quarter of that of the Croydon, was of greater value than the whole of the western world, with a population 7000 times greater at the least, for the last seventy years."

-Theodore Dalrymple

Memo

Yes, you must return stolen property.

Stolen Art Masterpieces Likely Destroyed

PARIS — To Olga Dogaru, a lifelong resident of the tiny Romanian village of Carcaliu, the strangely beautiful artworks her son had brought home in a suitcase four months earlier had become a curse.

No matter, she said, that the works — seven in all — were signed by Picasso, Matisse, Monet, Gauguin, Lucian Freud and Meyer de Haan. Her son had just been arrested on suspicion of orchestrating the art robbery of the century: stealing masterpieces in a brazen October-night theft from the Kunsthal museum in Rotterdam, the Netherlands.

But if the paintings and drawings no longer existed, Radu Dogaru, her son, could be free from prosecution, she reasoned. So Mrs. Dogaru told the police that on a freezing night in February, she placed all seven works — which included Monet’s 1901 “Waterloo Bridge, London”; Gauguin’s 1898 “Girl in Front of Open Window”; and Picasso’s 1971 “Harlequin Head” — in a wood-burning stove used to heat saunas and incinerated them.

Read the rest here.

Want Catholic art? Fundamentalist Bob Jones University has it

GREENVILLE, S.C. — Walking across the tidy campus of Bob Jones University, there’s no obvious sign this bastion of Christian fundamentalism is also home to one of the nation’s largest collections of Renaissance and Baroque religious art from the heart of Catholic Europe.

It’s all the more surprising since the school’s old-time Protestant leaders have for years taught that Catholicism is a “cult” and even the “Mother of Harlots.”

“You go into that gallery and its big, amazing paintings are really staggering, and you know you can’t buy altarpieces like that anymore,” said David Steel, curator of European art at the North Carolina Museum of Art and a longtime fan of the BJU collection. “They’re just not on the market.”

Edgar Peters Bowron, who oversees European art at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, agreed.

“It’s one of the best collections in the Southeast generally, and certainly in terms of Italian painting from the Renaissance through the Baroque, it is one of premier collections of Italian paintings in America, without contradiction,” he said.

Just as surprising as the collection itself, however, is that the man who started it 60 years ago was Bob Jones Jr., the school’s second president and the son of the university’s namesake.

The younger Jones was not only a purveyor of fine painting but also of the hoariest anti-Catholic tropes, calling the church of Rome “a satanic counterfeit,” for example, and “drunk with the blood of the saints.”

Read the rest here.

Russian painter K. Makovsky

I recommend double clicking and going to the YouTube page and then viewing on full screen.

Brazilian assassinates the Pope and others in "art"

Citing the “alleged crimes” of a variety of world leaders, Brazilian “artist” Gil Vicente’s drawings of himself killing different leaders opened at the Sao Paulo Art Biennial on Saturday.

To the best of my knowledge, it’s the first time that artwork - if you can call it that - depicting the assassination of the Pope has ever gone on display publicly. It’s offensive, outrageous, and hate-filled.

Vicente’s charcoal drawing of the Pope shows him confronting Pope Benedict XVI with a pistol. The Pope has his hands upturned.

As part of the series, Vicente is shown assassinating a total of nine world leaders, including former U.S. President George W. Bush, Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon, the former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, and Britain’s Queen.

Read the rest here.

I'm not gonna say that he broke any laws, though in many countries incitement to violence is illegal. But I will say that if I were in charge of the Secret Service, I'd tell this clown that he just bought himself a non-refundable ticket on the "No-Fly" list and a lifetime ban on entering the United States (not that he would necessarily care).

Hmmm

Shamelessly stolen from here.