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.

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.

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!

Sebastiano del Piombo, Study of Martha and other figures for the Raising of Lazarus, 1517. Frankfurt, Städel

Last week I was a guest on the live culture evening broadcast og Italian Radio 3 along with my great colleague and friend Costanza Barbieri to talk about Michelangelo and Sebastiano del Piombo on the occassion of our new(ish) book The Compass and the Mirror. If you can deal with my pessimo italiano, I think it turned out pretty informative, especially due to Costanza’s presence there. And if you just can’t get enough, here’s the video of the book presentation we did at the Accademia San Luca last autumn.

Lorenzo Lotto, Portrait of a man, probably 1540s, black chalk, 250 x 186 mm. Florence, Gallerie degli Uffizi

As you may remember I was involved in organising an exhibition on the portraits of renaissance artist Lorenzo Lotto back in 2018-19 with my colleagues Miguel Falomi­r and Enrico Maria Dal Pozzolo. It was shown at the Museo del Prado in Madrid and the National Gallery in London. An international conference was held at the Prado in 2018 and I presented there a paper on Lotto’s drawings. It has now been published by the Prado as part of the conference proceedings.

I’m thrilled to see it in print, even if I’m even less certain of the observations I make in it than I was when I was writing it. Very few sheets from Lotto’s hand survive, even if he must have been a prolific draughtsman — and clearly was a great one — so it is extremely hard to establish a reliable corpus of drawings securely attributable to him. Uncertainty has been a constant in scholarship on the subject and my article is no exception. Still, I hope it will prove useful, if nothing else as a summary of where we are on the subject, and also as a case study in the challenges and usefulness of connoisseurship. Do check it out.

Baldassare Castiglione, 1519

Matthias Wivel — The Compass and the Mirror

Elena Calvillo — Friendship, Medium and the Diverging Lives of Sebastiano del Piombo and Michelangelo

Piers Baker-Bates — Copies and Versions in Sebastiano’s Art? The Christ Carrying the Cross

Sheryl E. Reiss — A Word Portrait of a Medici Maecenas: Giulio de’ Medici (Pope Clement VII) as Patron of Art

Arnold Nesselrath — Raphael: Of Heirs and Pretenders

Matthias Wivel and Rachel Billinge — Sebastiano’s Vich Triptych

Carlo Piga — Da Michelangelo a Sebastiano: antiche suggestioni e moderne invenzioni nel ciclo decorativo della Cappella Borgherini in San Pietro in Montorio a Roma

Stefania Pasti — Aperietur in tempore: Sebastiano del Piombo and the Borgherini Chapel in the Light of Prophetic Readings

Paul Joannides — A New Drawing by Sebastiano del Piombo for the Semi-Dome of the Borgherini Chapel

Costanza Barbieri — Sebastiano as Portraitist and a Case Study: The Portrait of Michelangelo Pointing to His Drawings

Oriana Sartiani — A Portrait of Michelangelo Attributed to Sebastiano del Piombo: Technical Examination, Discoveries, and Treatment

Simonetta Antellini — L’originalità compositiva della Nascita della Vergine di Sebastiano del Piombo

Daniela Luzi — ‘Il bel secreto’: La pittura sperimentale sulla pietra di Sebastiano nella Cappella Chigi

Morten Steen Hansen — The Readings of Angels: Sebastiano del Piombo and the Politics of the Immaculate Conception

Andrea Donati — Marcello Venusti, Michelangelo and the Legacy of Sebastiano del Piombo

Charles Robertson — Michelangelo’s Last Judgement: Sebastiano del Piombo’s Contribution

Guido Reni, The Adoration of the Shepherds, about 1640, London, The National Gallery

See more ten-minute talks and other video content from the Gallery here.

From what I’ve seen in the press and online, I’m greatly impressed with their installation and didactic material they’ve put together, and it pleases me greatly to see these great Titians united in my American home away from home in Boston. I can’t wait hopefully to see it later in the autumn.

If you’re anyway near it, do go see it. It is truely and without hyperbole a once-in-a-lifetime chance. These are some of the great paintings of the Western tradition and they haven’t been seen together since the 1570s.