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| Dear Reader, welcome to the December newsletter. This issue introduces winter scenes from Europeana, takes you to the magical world of fairy tales, and highlights some our new content. Best wishes for the festive season from the Europeana team. | ||||||
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| Europeana Looks Ahead To 2011 | ||||||
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| More virtual exhibitions and new features for the Europeana.eu portal are waiting around the corner in 2011, and there will be a special bonus for music lovers. Some 45,000 images of musical instruments from museums across Europe will soon be published on Europeana.Read More... | ||||||
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| Winter Inspiration on Europeana | | New Content: Architecture and Art | | The Magic of Fairy Tales | ||
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Winter's cold days and long nights have fed the imaginations of Europe's painters, photographers, composers and filmmakers for centuries. Their impressions of people skating across icy ponds, snow-covered houses, skiers in majestic mountain landscapes and star-filled skies fill the pages of Europeana. Read More... | Explore the fine buildings and historic sites of Europe, see their transformation across time, and take a closer look at renowned works of art. The Image Library Foto Marburg and Cultura italia have made over 1.7 million works available on Europeana, giving you a unique opportunity to know more about Europe's art history. Read More... | Intricate lace of ice on windowpanes, a mosaic of prints on the snow, fresh scent of a fur tree... Winter brings with it the atmosphere of magic, taking us to the enchanting world of fairy tales. Browse through the marvelous collection of fairy tales on Europeana and find your favourite stories. Read More... | ||||
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| Europeana Looks Ahead To 2011 | ||||||
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 Photograph of Lawrence Crisp, Royal Engineers, Courtesy of The Great War Archive.  Photograph of James Manson, Signaller, Courtesy of The Great War Archive. | With 2011 just around the corner, Europeana is planning a series of exciting projects and improvements to unite Europe's cultural heritage and will also make usingEuropeana.eu even easier than before. The activities will start early next year, when Europeana will travel around Germany to gather First World War memorabilia such as family letters and pictures from local communities. Material contributed by the public will be digitised and included in Europeana. Some of the digitised objects will also be featured in a new virtual exhibition. The online display will place objects from Germany's citizens alongside items already gathered by the Great War Archive in the UK and First World War relics from institutions across Europe. In this way, the experiences of families on all sides of the trenches during the First World War will be represented in a single space, creating a unique pan-European view on an event traditionally covered from a solitary national perspective. More virtual exhibitions will follow later in the year, including one on the history of travel, which is being assembled by EuropeanaTravel and The European Library. These exhibitions are one of the main ways in which Europeana aims to highlight themes from the millions of items in our collection and show how digitisation can help unite Europe's shared cultural history, even when the physical objects are geographically far apart. For example, our debut exhibition on the theme of Art Nouveaubrought together posters, sculptures, photographs and designs from dozens of cultural institutions in 17 European countries. The spring and summer months will also be a time to unveil improvements to the functionality of the Europeana.eu portal. "We will focus on enriching the content and providing context. We'll improve search and discovery as well as inviting users to share their knowledge with us. Through APIs and widgets it will also be possible to re-use Europeana content on partner web sites," says David Haskiya, Europeana's product developer. Throughout the year, there will also be plenty of new content to explore. Musical instruments from museums across Europe will be added by MIMO, as will television footage from EUscreen and descriptions of archival materials from the APEnet project. | |||||
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| Winter Inspiration on Europeana | ||||||
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 Zima w Polsce, Courtesy of Biblioteka Uniwersytetu Marii Curie-Sklodowskiej.  De Potterierei in de winter, Groeninge Museum Bruges. |  Winter's cold days and long nights have fed the imaginations of Europe's painters, photographers, composers and filmmakers for centuries. Their impressions of people skating across icy ponds, snow-covered houses, skiers in majestic mountain landscapes and star-filled skies fill the pages of Europeana.Some such as the 20th century painting De Potterierei in de winter depict city streets dusted with snow, while others like this 1929 photograph of an ice-covered fisherman's hut in the Bulgarian seaside town of Varna show how harsh winter can be. Others take a more playful approach. There are whimsical posters of graceful skatersfrom prolific 19th century French artist Jules Chéret and objects inspired by winter celebrations, such as this Norwegian postcard showing a jolly Santa Claus. The inspiration of winter is also heard in song, through musical masterpieces, such as Tchaikovsky's December suite from his series The Seasons and of course the famous Four Seasons by Antonio Vivaldi. "Shivering, frozen mid the frosty snow in biting, stinging winds; running to and fro to stamp one's icy feet, teeth chattering in the bitter chill," is the sonnet Vivaldi penned to accompany the Allegro Non Molto portion of his Winter concerto and the music reflects these frigid experiences. And of course, from more modern times, we can watch videos of events such asChristmas celebrations at a church in Sweden, winter scenes from Paris in 1942 andfrom Italy. The pictures below represent a small sample of the winter-themed objects waiting to be discovered on Europeana. | |||||
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| New Content: Architecture and Art | ||||||
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 Tondo Doni, Courtesy of CulturaItalia.  Querschnitt des ersten Entwurfes, Courtesy of Deutsches Dokumentationszentrum für Kunstgeschichte. | Take a tour across Europe, visit cultural sites and discover masterpieces from Europeana's new collections: Foto Marburg at the German Documentation Centre for Art History and Cultura italia, the internet portal of the Italian ministry of culture. With its broad profile and a rich collection of original photographs from the 1870s until today, Foto Marburg is one of the largest image archives on European art and architecture. Many of the early photos effectively document objects of cultural heritage before their modification, damage or complete destruction. For example, the beautiful Baroque Dresden Frauenkirche, which was destroyed during World War II, has been reconstructed on the basis of the original architect's annotated diagrams and photographs from the Marburg image library. The magnifying tool on the Marburg's site enables you to see the finest details of George Bähr's magnificent conception, which has become one of the city's main tourist sites since its re-opening in 2005. Another highlight is the ceiling decoration with the magnificent painting Triumph of Prudence in the Town Hall in Augsburg, Germany, which was also destroyed during the war, and restored close to its original beauty with the help of historical photographs. In addition, Foto Marburg has an outstanding collection of photographs that document art in Germany from 1860 to modern day. For example, you can appreciate the work of the most prominent sculptor of Prussian classicism Gottfried Schadow depicting young princesses Luise und Friederike of Prussia. Cultura italia also brings you remarkable cultural works of different times and genres. Historical artefacts, interior details, and a number of Italian Renaissance masterpieces from the Uffizi in Florence are some of its marvellous highlights. Here you can see Doni Tondo by Michelangelo Buonarotti, the only existing panel painting that he created without the aid of his assistants. Commissioned by Agnolo Doni, the painting was to commemorate his marriage to a daughter of a powerful and influential Tuscan family. A similar use of colour can be also traced in Michelangelo's Sistine ceiling frescoes. You can also find La Tempesta by Venetian painter Giorgione, which is believed to be the first landscape in the history of Western paintings. La Tempesta portrays a soldier and a woman breast-feeding near a stream, against a backdrop of ruins and a gathering storm These are only a few examples of the two collections. Learn more about our new content and see for yourself. | |||||
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| The Magic of Fairy Tales | ||||||
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 Sleeping Beauty, Courtesy of Het Geheugen van Nederland.  The Tale of the Golden Cockerel, Courtesy of Chouvashia State Art Museum. | Terrifying dragons and beautiful princesses, evil stepmothers and friendly dwarfs, brave knights and hideous witches - all come to life in the magical world of fairy tales. Little Red Riding Hood, Cinderella or Puss in Boots are the characters who have become an inseparable part of our childhood memories. See the marvellous collection of fairy tales on Europeana and select your favourites. Long before fairy tales made it to print, they were passed on from generation to generation in an oral form. The Brothers Grimm from Germany are among the most renowned collectors of folk tales, who wrote them down and later edited them, making these tales into the literary works we know today. Here you can find the fascinating stories of the notable Brothers published in different languages. For example, Snow White in German, Town Musicians of Bremen in Spanish or The Frog Prince in Polish. Some of the Grimms' tales find roots in the books of Charles Perrault, who is one of the founders of the fairy tale literary genre. Little Red Riding Hood, The Sleeping Beauty,Cinderella and Tom Thumb are some of his best-known fairy tales. You can also discover works of the famous Danish writer, Hans Christian Andersen. Read his endearing stories about love in The Snow Queen, The Little Mermaid or The Steadfast Tin Soldier. Although it was his fairy tales, like The Ugly Duckling, that brought him fame, Andersen was also a profound novelist and a poet. You can see that in the first edition of his works on Europeana. Europeana also gives you the best stories from Russia: The tale of Tsar Saltan byAlexander Pushkin as well as illustrations to some of his other fairy tales. Want to know more? Try searching for: Fairy tales Brothers Grimm Charles Perrault Hans Christian Andersen | |||||
Revisiones bibliográficas. Documentación científica en Ortopedia y Traumatología, medicina deportiva, artroscopia, artroplastia y de todas las patologías del sistema Músculo-Esquelético
martes, 14 de diciembre de 2010
December newsletter. Europeana
When Overlooked Art Turns Celebrity
ABROAD
When Overlooked Art Turns Celebrity
Museo Nacional del Prado
“The Wine of St. Martin’s Day,” once unappreciated in a dark corridor, is now attributed to Pieter Bruegel the Elder and is being restored by the Prado.
By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN
Published: December 13, 2010
MADRID — The painting was beautiful, just not admired. Then suddenly, after more than four centuries, it was. It acquired a pedigree. The art hadn’t changed, but its stature had.
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Museo Nacional del Prado
A detail of the painting, showing a peasant celebrating during a festival for the first wine of the season.
And there it was the other day, propped on an easel in the Prado’s sunny, pristine conservation studio here, like a patient on the table in an operating theater. The most remarkable old master picture to have turned up in a long time revealed its every blemish and bruise, but also its virtues.
In September the Prado made news. It announced that this painting, “The Wine of St. Martin’s Day,” a panoramic canvas showing a mountain of revelers drinking the first wine of the season, and a few of them suffering its consequences, was by Pieter Bruegel the Elder.
Only 40-odd paintings by this 16th-century Flemish Renaissance master survive. This one, from around 1565, came from a private seller, whose ancient family, unaware and clearly unconcerned, had kept it for eons in the proverbial dark corridor, in Córdoba, where it accumulated dirt. Then the Prado conservators took a look. What seemed to be the artist’s signature turned up beneath layers of grime and varnish.
What is it about the discovery of a new work by a textbook name? Headlines over the years have trumpeted this Bruegel, a possible Velázquez unearthed from a university museum basement in Connecticut, a supposed Michelangelo in the foyer of some New York town house where countless people over the years passed it before anybody made a peep. And much more.
The inevitable fuss that followed these announcements can be only partly chalked up to the popular fantasy of finding treasure in the attic, or to the obvious prospect of seeing more great art. Truth be told, new discoveries aren’t always great. The art may have been in plain sight all along, like that Michelangelo statue, which languished in the French Embassy’s cultural services office on Fifth Avenue for most of the last century before its (now much doubted) attribution. Or it may have been some murky painting already hanging in a museum, with a label saying it was the handiwork of an unknown “school of” someone or someplace, or by some obscure artist whose name didn’t make us pause.
Then the news breaks about its ostensible author, and we slap our heads, yet again, for relying on labels rather than on our eyes, a lesson finally learned, we tell ourselves before admiring the discovery because of its fancier label, as if anything had really changed.
Connoisseurship, notwithstanding the chemicals and gizmos modern science has concocted to aid in its detective work, remains an art. That’s the beauty part of it, and what also keeps alive the business of looking, the flip side of this business being how money and fame can sometimes make dreamers or opportunists out of even the most scrupulous experts and institutions. Is that really a Velázquez the Met announced that it owned? Or a Velázquez that Yale believes it found in its storeroom? Or a Michelangelo that came from the foyer?
In the case of the Bruegel, the signature was not the only argument for saying he did the picture. As with a few other works Bruegel painted, “The Wine of St. Martin’s Day” is done in tempera on fine linen, the pigment mixed not with egg or oil but glue. What results is a fragile matte surface from which paint gradually falls away. Even with the later varnish removed, a gauzy scrim seems to cloud the remaining image. Glue from a liner long ago added to the back of the canvas has also caused parts of the picture to pucker and bulge.
So the painting wasn’t easy to decipher, but, on close inspection, not withstanding the damage, it still looked exceptionally beautiful, almost more so for being fragile and ghostly. In the clear light of the conservation studio, you can admire the delicacy of faces and hands and feet, alive and varied, making a jigsaw of humane detail, Bruegel’s trademark: the cripple kneeling at St. Martin’s feet; the mother gulping wine with a baby still clasped to her breast; and the fallen drunk, limbs bent and splayed like a ragamuffin, face in the dirt.
Copies and an engraving based on the picture further obscured its probable link to Bruegel by attributing the image to his elder son, Pieter the Younger, whose studio turned out dim copies of the father’s art, or else to Jan, Bruegel’s other son. The former chief curator of Flemish painting at the Prado, having never seen “The Wine of St. Martin’s Day” except in reproduction, published an article in a Spanish journal in 1980 that also attributed it to Pieter the Younger.
Museo Nacional del Prado
“The Wine of St. Martin's Day,” painted with pigment mixed with glue, has deteriorated, with parts of the canvas bulging.
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But the other morning, Gabriele Finaldi, the Prado’s deputy director, recalled having noticed the painting two years ago. Its owner, a young heiress to the historic Medinaceli family, invited Mr. Finaldi to examine a different work that she wanted to sell. He told her he was intrigued by the Bruegel. A year later Sotheby’s, acting on the owner’s behalf, requested an export license to sell it abroad, and the Prado, unsure about the attribution, asked to inspect the picture first.
Privately, dealers are always boasting about spectacular finds: an unknown El Greco in a country home here, a long-lost Rubens in a private collection there. To ask the original question another way: Why do we want these works to turn out to be by Velázquez and Michelangelo? After all, the art is the same either way.
Partly, of course, there’s the simple pleasure of a good yarn well told, and Michelangelo generally provides a better payoff to a whodunit than Baccio Bandinelli. There’s big money involved too. When that Bruegel signature materialized, the Spanish Ministry of Culture invoked national patrimony law, which, as Mr. Finaldi acknowledged, amounts to a kind of state-sanctioned blackmail, albeit in service to the public. The law meant the museum could prevent export and name its price. What might have gone for $100 million or more on the open market (who knows?), went for $9 million, which the government, near financial collapse, will take its time to pay.
The conservator in charge of the painting’s restoration, Elisa Mora, pantomimed the other morning how she still planned to remove the picture’s old lining and glue, a tricky process akin to peeling skin, she said, except, unlike skin, torn canvas doesn’t repair itself. Sometime next year the work should join the museum’s famous Bruegel, “The Triumph of Death,” a prospect that poses a few curatorial challenges because the new picture is so much bigger, painted differently and in much less robust condition, making the pair an odd couple.
At the same time, linking them to Bosch’s “Garden of Earthly Delights,” with which the “Triumph” has long been exhibited, will require some fresh thinking and maybe the rearranging of a few rooms to get everything straight.
And then the public will finally get its newest old master. In the end we want another celebrity attribution like this one because we want to get things straight. History tries to make sense out of chaos, toward which the world inevitably inclines. Art historians create hierarchies, categories and movements; they attribute causes and effects to conjure an appearance of logic.
Attributing a picture to a household deity like Bruegel or Michelangelo affirms our sense of control, our ability to get a grip on our affairs, at least for the moment. We take comfort in mooring some grimy, forgotten canvas, another example of life’s flotsam and, implicitly, of our own fate, to one of the pillars of art history. After centuries in the wilderness, home. It’s the story of Odysseus in Ithaca, among countless other myths.
There is always hope, in other words, the chance of redemption no matter how belated, a slender thread to lead us out of oblivion, meaning it is not merely order we seek. It is also the prospect of endlessly reordering the world, so that nothing is ever quite settled, so that everything remains possible, in life and in posterity, as in art. Today a neglected picture, a bedraggled Cinderella, like a surrogate self, hides in the attic. Tomorrow it’s at the Prado.
And ultimately, that Bruegel is us.
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