Marcia Pointon | |
---|---|
Nationality | British |
Education | University of Manchester |
Scientific career | |
Fields | History of British art; European early modern visual culture |
Institutions | University of Sussex |
Marcia Pointon is a historian of British art. She trained at the University of Manchester, receiving her PhD there in 1974. From 1975, she was at the University of Sussex, becoming Professor of the History of Art in 1989. [1] In 1992, she moved to the University of Manchester to take the Pilkington Professorship in the History of Art, a position she held until 2002. [2] She now works as a free-lance consultant and researcher. [3]
Pointon is a prolific author, widely recognised as one of the leading scholars of British art. She has written over fifteen books and numerous scholarly articles and reviews. [4] Her innovative approach to the subject emerged with her book Naked Authority: The Body in Western Painting [5] and developed further with Hanging the Head: Portraiture and Social Formation in Eighteenth-Century England. [6] Continuing her exploration of the semiotics of the body, Pointon published Brilliant Effects: A Cultural History of Gem Stones and Jewellery, a study of personal adornment in western culture. [7] Brilliant Effects was awarded the Historians of British Art book prize in 2011 single author category post 1800 for books published 2010/2011. Her most recent book is Portrayal and the Search for Identity, Reaktion Books 2013, ISBN 9781780230412, reviewed in Apollo Magazine July/August 2013: , p. 97' Pointon has led the field in applying theoretical discourse to the business of thinking about art, notably in the context of long eighteenth-century British culture.'
Pointon's most read work is probably History of Art: A Students' Handbook (1980) which has become an established introductory text for students beginning in art history. The book was reissued in 1986, 1993 and 1997. A fifth and substantially rewritten edition was published by Routledge in 2014.
Since 2009 Pointon has researched and published on the relationships between materials and meanings as for example in her essay Enduring Characteristics and Unstable Hues: Men in Black in French Painting in the 1860s and 1870s in Art History September 2017 and her chapter The Importance of Gems in the work of Peter Paul Rubens 1577-1640 in Ben van den Bercken and Vivian Baan, eds., Engraved Gems. From Antiquity to the Present, Leiden 2017
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Lavinia Fontana was a Bolognese Mannerist painter active in Bologna and Rome. She is best known for her successful portraiture, but also worked in the genres of mythology and religious painting. She was trained by her father Prospero Fontana who was a teacher at the School of Bologna. She is regarded as the first female career artist in Western Europe as she relied on commissions for her income. Her family relied on her career as a painter, and her husband served as her agent and raised their 11 children. She was perhaps the first female artist to paint female nudes, but this is a topic of controversy among art historians.
Portrait of a Young Girl is a small oil-on-oak panel painting by the Early Netherlandish painter Petrus Christus. It was completed towards the end of his life, between 1465 and 1470, and is held in the Gemäldegalerie, Berlin. It marks a major stylistic advance in contemporary portraiture; the girl is set in an airy, three-dimensional, realistic setting, and stares out at the viewer with a complicated expression that is reserved, yet intelligent and alert.
Take Your Son, Sir! (1851–56) is an unfinished painting by Ford Madox Brown which depicts a woman showing her newborn son to its father. She is offering her baby towards the viewer of the painting, who is implicitly equated with the father - seen in the mirror behind, opening his arms to receive the baby. The mirror also forms a halo behind the mother's head, and the pattern on the wallpaper suggests the starry heavens. Brown's principal influence was Jan van Eyck's painting the Arnolfini Marriage Portrait, recently acquired by the National Gallery. The mirror resembles the circular mirror in van Eyck's painting, which reflects an image of the artist looking at the couple in the image.
Hairwork, or jewelry or artwork made of human hair, has appeared throughout the history of craft work, particularly to be used for private worship or mourning. From the Middle Ages through the early twentieth century, memorial hair jewelry remained common. Hair, considered to be a remnant off the person it was cut from, also has often played a part in myths and legends; in a Swedish book of proverbs, one can read that “rings and bracelets of hair increase love”. One example can be found in Denmark, at Rosensborg’s palace, which is a bracelet of precious metal with a simple braided lock of hair - a gift from King Christian IV (1577-1648) to his queen. Another example would be the rings commemorating the execution of King Charles I of England (1600-1649), which circulated among his faithful supporters. Other famous people who owned hair jewelry include Napoleon, Admiral Nelson, Queen Victoria and her large family, Christina Nilsson and Jenny Lind.
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Vic Gatrell is a British historian. He is a Life Fellow of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge.
The nude, as a form of visual art that focuses on the unclothed human figure, is an enduring tradition in Western art. It was a preoccupation of Ancient Greek art, and after a semi-dormant period in the Middle Ages returned to a central position with the Renaissance. Unclothed figures often also play a part in other types of art, such as history painting, including allegorical and religious art, portraiture, or the decorative arts. From prehistory to the earliest civilizations, nude female figures were generally understood to be symbols of fertility or well-being.
Sigismunda mourning over the Heart of Guiscardo, fully titled Sigismunda mourning over the Heart of Guiscardo, her murder'd Husband, is an oil painting by British artist William Hogarth. Finished in 1759, it was the principal piece of the eight works he displayed in an exhibition in 1761. It was the final and most ambitious of his attempts to secure for himself a reputation as a history painter. It depicts a dramatic moment in one of the novelle in Boccaccio's Decameron. While Hogarth had expected this work to be acclaimed as a masterpiece of dramatic painting, the work was met with criticism and ridicule. In the catalogue of the exhibition of Hogarth's works at the Tate Gallery in 2007, the criticism was described as "some of the most damning critical opprobrium the artist ever suffered".
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Mary Diana Lee Sheriff was an American art historian, and W.R. Kenan, Jr. Distinguished Professor of Art History at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who specialized in eighteenth-century French art, decorative arts, gender studies, and material culture.
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Gillian Perry is professor of history of art at the Open University. She is a specialist in eighteenth century portraiture and has written two books on the actress in art. In 2011/12 she curated the exhibition The First Actresses at the National Portrait Gallery in London which was widely reviewed.
Lynda Nead is a British curator and art historian. She is currently the Pevsner Chair of the History of Art at Birkbeck, University of London. Nead's work studies British art, media, culture and often focuses on gender. Nead is a fellow of the British Academy, the Royal Historical Society and of the Academia Europaea.
Marcia Hall, who usually publishes as Marcia B. Hall, is an American art historian, who is the Laura H. Carnell Professor of Renaissance Art at the Tyler School of Art and Architecture of Temple University in Philadelphia. Hall's scholarship has concentrated on Italian Renaissance painting, mostly of the sixteenth century, and especially Raphael and Michelangelo.