The Burlington Magazine has a global reach this month; it features articles on art and architecture from Paris to Pondicherry and Peking. The chronological scope is also very broad, ranging from the Roman Empire to late Imperial China of the Qing dynasty.
Two magnificent eighteenth-century Chinese hand scrolls (one in the British Museum and the other in the Victoria & Albert Museum, both London), each 20 metres long, are covered in meticulous paintings of precious objects; however, they carry no inscriptions and their function has remained mysterious. Ricarda Brosch presents here fascinating new research, which establishes that they were originally intended as wall decorations and remounted as scrolls to be presented as a honorific gift at the tomb of the Yongzheng Emperor.
The June Magazine also includes articles by Ittai Gradel on a rediscovered Roman cameo, Ariane Perrin on images of the Buddhist paradise in Korea and Gauvin Alexander Bailey on Pondicherry Cathedral, the most ambitions church of its type in French India. We also present a new attribution to the Venetian Renaissance metalworker, Orazio Fortezza, by Flora Turner-Vucetic.
Exhibition reviews feature Jonny Yarker on Angelica Kauffman (Royal Academy of Arts, London), John Renner on the Maestro di San Francesco (Galleria Nazionale dell’Umbria, Perugia), Paula Nuttall on Van Eyck (Musée du Louvre, Paris) and Peter Cooke on Toulouse-Lautrec (Palazzo Roverella, Rovigo). Meanwhile, book reviews include discussions of Gothic ivories by Naomi Speakman, Thomas Lawrence by Amina Wright and smell in art by Jonathan Ribner.
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