december 2023

Trois Crayons Newsletter, December 2023

to listen

Carrie Vout on Venus, Hermaphroditus, and other Classical Bodies in Art

Katy Hessel, host of the Great Women Artist’s podcast, speaks with Caroline Vout, Professor of Classics at the University of Cambridge, about the idealisation of women’s bodies in art and its roots in classical antiquity, beginning with the problem of how to depict an immortal being in material form. These classical bodies would come to define the canon of Western academic artistic learning and formed the idealised models which would be studied and emulated by centuries of artists from the Renaissance onward.

to watch

Conserving Old Master Drawings: A Balancing Act

In keeping with this month’s interview topic this video which was posted to the Getty’s YouTube channel in 2010 is a highly insightful view into one of the paper conservator’s restoration techniques. The case in point is a German drawing from the circle of Wolf Huber.

to read

Drawings Connoisseurship and the Problem of Multiple Originals

Louisa Wood Ruby addresses one of the thornier areas of drawings scholarship: the possibility of multiple autograph versions of the same drawn composition. While scholars of old master paintings are more willing to accept the existence of multiple originals, old master drawings specialists are more reluctant to do so. By examining the case of Paul Bril, Wood Ruby posits various potential explanations for the existence of “autograph copies”.