2025.12.26
[I] commenced taking apart my second, used copy of Marcel Duchamp/Ephemerides while a recently purchased used copy of The Apparently Marginal Activities of Marcel Duchamp arrived with today's post. Gosh, is the above image now a work of art, or just a visual record of my own apparently marginal activities? I'm too tired, you decide.
2022.12.26
From The Discovery of Piranesi's Final Project
26 December 2022 Monday
Bénigne Gagneraux, detail of The Meeting of the King Gustav III of Sweden and the Pope Pius VI at the Museo Pio-Clementino in Rome on 1 January 1784 (Stockholm: Nationalmuseum, 1785).
Bénigne Gagneraux, detail of The Meeting of the King Gustav III of Sweden and the Pope Pius VI at the Museo Pio-Clementino in Rome on 1 January 1784 (Prague: National Gallery, 1785).
The scene from the Museo Pio-Clementino is a somewhat adapted replica of a painting that Gageraux made for Gustav III in 1785, now housed in the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm. The painting records the encounter of the Protestant ruler with the head of the Catholic Church during an inspection of the rich sculpture collection in the Vatican Museum. Inspections of art collections commonly formed part of official visits. The meeting took place shortly after the Vatican museums were opened to the public on the first day of 1784. The artist finished the canvas in March 1785. Still before being transported to Sweden it had received exceptional recognition and Pope Pius VI commissioned a replica of it. This signed and dated painting fell in the hands of the Imperial Army in Italy in 1798-1801. The piece was loaned from Franz II’s collections to the Prague Castle, from where it entered the Picture Gallery of the Society of Patriotic Friends of the Arts (the predecessor of the National Gallery Prague). The scene is set in the Hall of Muses, with a view of the Sala Rotonda; the representive nature of the scene is enhanced by the depicted sculptures, among them a copy of the Amazon by Phaedias, The Three Graces, Apollo of the Belvedere and Ganymede. Most of the men in the king's retinue can be identified. In some aspects, the Prague painting is a perfected variant of the first version. In the first version of the composition, two faces known from the Prague painting are missing. These are of Cardinal Pierre de Bernis to the right of the pope and the young man at the side of the animatedly gesturing prelate, who may conceivably be the painter himself. It is of some interest that here he portrayed himself in a different, more important place than in the first version of the painting, where he depicted himself in the background, in a group with Francesco Piranesi and Johan Tobias Sergel.
sbirky.ngprague.cz/en/dielo/CZE:NG.O_9025
2020.12.26
11:45
Virtual Painting 603
2015.12.26
15122601.db House for a Skateboarder schematic model Ury/Savoye site
2002.12.26
Museumpeace
  
2000.12.26
a change of plan
In all likelihood, the 20th century architects that looked at Giovanni Battista Piranesi's Ichnographia Campus Martius did not see this large plan of ancient Rome's Campo Marzio in the way that Piranesi first engraved it. That the Ichnographia exists in two different states is indeed a knowledge of which architecture's historical scholars and foremost practitioners have so far remained oblivious. The commonly published Campo Marzio plan does not match Piranesi's original rendition exactly. The change of plan is clearly evident upon a careful view of the circuses delineated throughout both versions of the plan. In the original version, each circus within Piranesi's Campo Marzio plan integrally engages its surrounding buildings, while each circus within the later version of the Ichnographia is redrawn completely and disengaged from its immediate surroundings. When, why, and by whom these changes occurred is perhaps to be found out by future scholarship. Meanwhile, it is best to document precisely what the two states of the Ichnographia Campus Martius
This is a rendition of the Ichnographia in its second and most widely published state. Although still dated 1757 like the original version, the above plan is not identical to the large plan as published within Il Campo Marzio dell'Antica Roma, Opera di G. B. Piranesi socio della reale societŕ degli antiquari di Londra, 1762.
Learning from Lacunae
...introduce new mysteries while solving old ones.
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