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.

I’ve recently had a couple of scholarly articles published in two anthology volumes. I hope you will check them out.

One is a treatment, my most comprehensive yet, of Titian’s engagement with reproductive printmaking, from his scattered interactions with printmakers working after his designs and finished works in the earlier parts of his career, his involvement in Venetian literary circles from the later 1520s onwards and its manifestation in book illustration and print portraiture, to his increased collaboration with printers and printmakers issuing prints after his paintings from the 1550s onwards, culminating in his famous work with Cornelis Cort in the mid 1560s through 1571.

The article is included in the anthology Titian: Themes and Variations, edited by the great Peter Humfrey. It compiles new scholarship on Titian’s practice of replication and variation throughout his career and across media, written by many of the top scholars in the field. I’m honoured to be included.

The other article was developed from a conference paper I gave during covid for a Roman conference on Raphael in 2021, postponed like so many other things involving Raphael, from the anniversary year of 2020. It examines the close creative exchange, competition and mutual inspiration between Raphael, Sebastiano del Piombo and Michelangelo in Rome during the second decade of the sixteenth century and beyond. I have new things to say about Raphael’s appropriations from the Sistine Chapel ceiling, his and Sebastiano’s race to complete mural paintings in oil, the internal chronology of their respective renditions of the Transfiguration of Christ and a proposal about Michelangelo’s contribution to Sebastiano’s never-complete altarpiece for the Chigi chapel in Santa Maria della Pace.

It is published in the volume Himmlische und irdische Liebe: Ein anderer Blick auf Raffael, edited by Yvonne Dohna Schlobitten, Claudia Bertling Biaggini, Claudia Cieri Via, a rich compendium of work by a wide variety of scholars on this crucial period in the history of modern Western art.

Do take a look at either or both when you’re next at your academic library. I also recommend getting them for your own bookshelves of course, but realise that that is a longer shot.