In the latest issue of Print Quarterly, I review Glenn Fleishman’s instructive, detail-oriented How Comics Were Made — A Visual History from the Drawing Board to the Printed Page. The book is a very helpful examination of the complicated, sometimes arcane, production and printing processes behind newspaper strips in particular, from the late nineteenth century till today. Here’s an excerpt:

Chromolithography, Electrotype, chalk plates, flongs, Zip-a-Tone, X-Acto knives, Ben Day dots, stat cameras, Rubylith, rubber cement, Wacom. The terms emanating from mass media printing in the modern era, notably in the realm of comic strips, are recondite yet evocative. They might baffle even print connoisseurs, and while comics afficionados are generally vaguely familiar with them, the arcane, highly specialized processes of which they are part, and which have brought comics to life on the page for upward of two centuries, remain exotic abstracts to most.

 

In steps Fleishman with this comprehensive study of the printing techniques of North American newspaper comics from the dawn of mass media to the digital present. Not an academic study, the book brings the enthusiastic zeal and keen attention to detail which, in the still institutionally unconsolidated domain of comics and cartoon studies, largely remains the preserve of fans.

In other words, this book is a balm for anyone curious about this and as such highly recommended.

Catch the review in Print Quaterly, available in better research libraries the world over!

TITIAN! new publication from yours truly. I contributed an extensive section on prints after Titian to this catalogue of the collection of pictures by, after, and around Titian in the collection of Alec Cobbe at Hatchlands Park.

Often neglected, prints designed or sanctioned by the artist, or made after his work either during his lifetime or in the centuries following his death are a rich visual source for understanding his work and its reception, and sometimes they’re even great works of art themselves.

It’s been a pleasure to write these entries and thus to contibute to a still mostly ignored field of study. The book is published by the Colnaghi Foundation. Look it up!

Det er gået lidt langsomt med vores overgang til video på Radio Rackham, men jeg håber de ting vi laver er ventetiden værd. Jeg har længe holdt meget af Käthe Kollwitz, og ikke mindre nu hvor jeg arbejder så intenst med Michelangelo, så det virkede ekstra meningsfuldt at min udstiling på SMK ligger lige efter den om Kollwitz, som er der nu. Desværre overlapper de ikke, for hun er efter min mening måske den kunstner i det tyvende århundrede, der forstod Michelangelo bedst.

Nå, men det var jo en god anledning til at læse nogle af hendes billedserier i Video Rackham og til det formål satte vi Rikke Villadsen, der selv netop har udgivet en tegneserie om sin fortolkning af Kollwitz. Jeg synes det blev en fin samtale, med et rigt udøvende perspektiv på værket.

Lyt her og læs mere på Nummer9.

I know, it’s been open for a while, but I wanted at least to put a few words to my last show at the National Gallery in here. Organized in collaboration with my excellent colleague Maria Alambritis, who took the lead on it it when we started planning sometime in 2023, it focuses on the Gallery’s monumental, and monumentally weird, altarpiece, so-called “Vision of St Jerome” (1526-7), which recently emerged from a decades-long restoration, expertly handled by another fantastic colleague, Larry Keith, Head of Conservation at the Gallery. Alongside it, we gathered a selection of the many surviving drawings Parmigianino made for the painting, which in addition to offering a showcase of spirited, virtuoso drawing of real originality and startling imagination, helps one understand the artist’s mutational creativitiy.

Parmigianino was the artist I first wanted to created an exhibition around when I started at the Gallery in 2013 and although the great monograph I dreamt about never happened, I am pleased that we were able to put together this show, even if I, having left London, regret not being able to go reguarly. If you’re in London, do what I can’t — go see it! And if not, do look up our catalogue.

Also, check out Maria’s presentation on the show at the Italian Institute on 6 February. The show runs till 9 March.

Workshop of Hugo van der Goes, The Adoration of the Kings, 1470s? SMK, Copenhagen.

Lyt her og læs mere på Nummer9.

To paraphrase one of its former director, Kenneth Clark, it has been, and remains, one of the civilising forces of the Western imagination.”

I believe this light show is happening more or less as I write this from my home in Copenhagen, Denmark, to where I’ve happily — but also a little mournfully — returned on a permanent basis.

Titian, Angel, c. 1559-65, Florence, Uffizi

I have a new article out, on Titian’s use of drawing for his narrative works. It attempts to reassess what we know in light especially of a series of new and eye-opening technical discoveries regarding the underdrawing and revisions to his paintings made over recent decades. The volume it’s in, Venetian Disegno. out from Paul Holberton, is really excellent in my opinion, with many interesting contributions. Kudos to editors Maria Aresin, Thomas Dalla Costa, as well as Genevieve Verdigel who co-organised the online conference that started it all, back when we were all locked down.

Maria Aresin and Thomas Dalla Costa, eds., Venetian Disegno – New Frontiers c. 1420-1620, London, Paul Holberton Publishing 2024. It retails at a somewhat reasonable price — more here!

Michelangelo, A study of a seated nude man for the ‘Battle of Cascina’. 1504-5, London: The British Museum

I’ve had the plesure of contributing an expansive, critical essay on Michelangelo’s life and art to a monumentally conceived, high-end compilation volume of the Michelangelo drawings at the British Museum, published by Spanish book afficionados Artika Press. It consists of two volumes, the central one of which includes high-quality, full-size reproductions of all the drawings, while a study book includes essays on the drawings by my excellent colleagues at the British Museum Hugo Chapman and Sarah Vowles, in addition to my essay. They are encased in a glriously wild case featuring a relief reproduction of Michelangelo’s David!

The essay was a thrill to write and I’m excited to be in such great company and to find publication under such fantastic conditions. Simply titled “Michelangelo: Life and Art”, my essay starts like this:

Michelangelo made modern art. Not alone, not

on his own, but if we were to point to a single

artist responsible for establishing in our collective

consciousness the notion of art as self-expression, it

would be he. And he did it on a scale unmatched by

his contemporaries, giving his art a heroism integral

to our narrative of his pre-eminence. Yet there are

also profound intimacies to his work, emotional

disclosures—even vulnerabilities. This dichotomy,

surely, has been crucial to his position at the centre

of the western canon.

Here’s an image of the product, which I believe retails at a price beyond most of our means.

See more on the Artika website.

Sebastiano del Piombo, Polyphemus, fresco, 1511-12, Rome, Villa Farnesina

I am continuing my writings about sixteenth-century caricature, grotesque (see also here) and what I’d call proto-cartooning with an article in the anthology Grotesque and Caricature: Leonardo to Bernini, ably edited by Rebecca Norris and Lucia Tantardini and just published by Brill. The article, “Sebastiano’s Caricatural Gesture and the Path to Idealism”, focuses on Sebastiano del Piombo who never actively pursued the grotesque or even the broadly caricatural, but nevertheless incorporate a certain caricatural simplification, even abstraction, in his art that among other things strengthened the spiritual message of his art.

The book has plenty of fascinating articles on the subject of early modern caricature and grotesque. Well worth seeking out for people interested in the subject.

Rebecca Norris and Lucia Tantardini, eds., Grotesque and Caricature – Leonardo to Bernini, Leiden: Brill, 2024, pp. 55-78. Find it at your local art library. See more here.

This is not only the first Italian Renaissance painting to enter the collection, but an incredibly rare piece of the so-called Roman High Renaissance, ie. that crucial period in the first few decades of the sixteenth-century when artists, poets, humanists reshaped our culture, defining core aspects for what we call the modern era. Peruzzi was friendly with, and worked alongside such key figures as Raphael, Michelangelo, Bramante, and Sebastiano del Piombo. Primarily an architect, secondarily a freso painter, only htree or four easel paintings by him survive and this one is the finest. Before its recent sale, it belonged to the family of the great connoisseur, curator at the British Museum, Philip Pouncey who died in 1990. I hope he would have been happy with its entrance into such a fine national collection.

Check out this short video on X, featuring Anne, Olivia, Marika Spring, Head of Science at the National Gallery, and myself talking about the picture.

Over the past months, I’ve been working with colleagues across the National Gallery, particularly my two curatorial colleagues Maria Alambritis and Charlotte Wytema, on a new temporary presentation of a selection of the Gallery’s Venetian paintings from Giovanni Bellini to Titian, roughly. The display was conceived to inaugurate the newly – and beautifully – refurbished room 29 as part of our bicentenary NG200 celebrations. It is poignant, I think, that room 29 which first opened in 1930 was originally designed precisely for the Venetian paintings.

Although a collection display, our presentation is organised like a exhibition, presenting the story of Venetian painting in the period, the lives of the artists, the social, religious and political context with a view to elucidating why it was so pivotal in the development of Western painting, collected so assiduously in Britain (and elsewhere) in the nineteenth century and thus why it is so core to the National Gallery’s collections.

In the video above, my colleague Carlo Corsato introduces a number of the key players in the organisation of the display, including of course yours truly. Do come have a look if you’re in London and let me know what you think!

A bit late to announce this here, but I contributed an article, entitled “The Chigi Graffiti”, on the graffiti on the walls of the loggia di Galatea at the Villa Farnesina in Rome, under the famous fresco by Raphael, the Triumph of Galatea (c. 1512-13), as well as the somewhat less famous one of Polyphemus by Sebastiano del Piombo (1511). These comprise a range of caricatured figures and heads as well as more naturalistic drawings and, some clearly by Sebastiano and some possibly — even probably — by Raphael.

I examine these closely in my article, which was published in the catalogue for the recently closed exhibition at the Farnesina, Raffaello e l’antico nella villa di Agostino Chigi, curated by my friend and colleague Costanza Barbieri. It was a great show, which brought back to the Farnesina a number of the antique sculptures that were in the collection of the villa’s original owner, the hugely wealthy banker Agostino Chigi, from the collections in which they’re dispersed today.

My examination of the graffiti is the latest in a number of articles I’ve written focusing on caricature and doodling by some of the great artists of the renaissance. You can get the catalogue here.