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Papers by Maria Aresin

Maria Aresin, Bleeding Paper: The Use of Red Oil Paint in Drawings from Tintoretto’sWorkshop Amo... more Maria Aresin, Bleeding Paper: The Use of Red Oil Paint in Drawings from Tintoretto’sWorkshop

Amongst the drawings by Tintoretto and his workshop there are some twenty sheets showing figure studies on the recto and tracings made with reddish brown oil paint of the same figure on the verso. Sometimes these tracings appear again on the recto, covering the black chalk contour lines of the body shapes with pasty paint. Only the outlines are rendered or copied as if to create a plain stencil of the figures position without highlighting or adding also the inner body volumes or muscles. It seems that no other artist at the time in Venice used this particular technique. Until now, its function has been unclear, particularly because although these drawings are kept in famous drawing collections (Uffizi, Morgan Library, Museo Capodimonte), they have yet to be studied. This paper will shed light on Tintoretto’s use of oil paint on blue or buff brown paper as a method of mirroring the figure to create new possibilities and adapt the postures to many paintings at the same time, thus recycling his figure studies for different purposes. Understanding that process of tracing, reversing and adapting the figure helps to better understand the process of preparing a painting in the Tintoretto workshop.

The Munich Palma-Albums (cat. essay), and 14 entries: Tintoretto, Veronese, Titian, Lotto etc., In: ZEITLER, Kurt: Venedig. La Serenissima – Zeichnung und Druckgraphik aus vier Jahrhunderten, Berlin/Munich 2022, pp. 52–87, 134–136, 163–165, 228–230, 240–254, 257–259, 265–268, 270–272, 304–307.

This essay discusses the two albums with drawings by Palma il Giovane and his workshop in the Sta... more This essay discusses the two albums with drawings by Palma il Giovane and his workshop in the Staatliche Graphische Sammlung in Munich.

Summary This article sheds light on the meaning of the motif of the dog on coins and medals by G... more Summary
This article sheds light on the meaning of the motif of the dog on coins and medals by Gaspare Moro- ne (G. MORON) and Giacomo Ozegni (I.O.F.) minted in 1627 for Vincenzo II Gonzaga. Vincenzo’s dog-impresa with its motto Feris Tantum Infensus (“Hostile only against the feral”) goes back to a story in Pliny’s Natural History (VIII 149–150) in which he speaks of two very wild dogs that were gifted from the King of Albania to Alexander the Great. Those dogs, just as the motto of the coins explains, were only hunting much bigger ferocious animals such as elephants, while reacting rather unimpressed when confronted with the usual game. The article discusses the different versions of the coins and medals with dog-motifs by Morone and Ozegni. Furthermore, the paper presents previous- ly unpublished documents on the Zecca in Mantua during the reign of Vincenzo II.

Zusammenfassung
Der vorliegende Beitrag beleuchtet erstmalig die Bedeutung des Hundemotivs der Münzen und Me- daillen, die von Gaspare Morone (G. MORON) und Giacomo Ozegni (I.O.F.) entworfen und welche 1627 für die nur ein Jahr währende Amtszeit Vincenzos II. Gonzaga geprägt wurden. Die Imprese Vincenzos II., die einen Hund mit dem Motto Feris Tantum Infensus („Nur den Wilden feindlich“) zeigt, geht auf eine Erzählung nach Plinius (Nat. hist. VIII 149–150) zurück, der über die unnatürlich starken Hunde berichtet, die Alexander der Große vom König von Albanien geschenkt bekam. Ne- ben ikonographischen Hintergründen bespricht der Beitrag hier erstmals publizierte Dokumente zur Zecca von Mantua unter Vincenzo II. sowie die unterschiedlichen Versionen der Hundemünzen der beiden Stempelschneider Morone und Ozegni.

Imaging Utopia, 2021

The notion of the Golden Age was used in numerous texts, diaries and travel accounts in the so-ca... more The notion of the Golden Age was used in numerous texts, diaries and travel accounts in the so-called age of the discoveries. This article examines the textual and visual sources of a long lost period when mankind lived in harmony in sources between the end of the fifteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth centuries.

This article examines the paintings of the Four Ages of Man by Gerard de Lairesse (Musée des Beau... more This article examines the paintings of the Four Ages of Man by Gerard de Lairesse (Musée des Beaux-Arts Orléans) against the background of his art theoretical writings. The commission of the four grisaille paintings by the Dutch merchant Pieter Hunthum and the later sale of the paintings are discussed in the second part of the article as are the moral implications and the iconography of the paintings.

Animals and Courts, 2019

Squirrels have been pets since antiquity and became especially popular during the Middle Ages whe... more Squirrels have been pets since antiquity and became especially popular during the Middle Ages when they were also part of a Minne- and gift culture.
This article examines the pet squirrel’s role as part of this gift culture by means of an analysis of visual and textual sources on squirrels as pets from the Middle Ages to the Early Modern. Squirrels were popular pets for women and children. They were kept in specific cages and chained with leashes to their owners garment. The article furthermore explains some symbolic meanings the squirrel obtained due to its physical features, namely sexual connotations that were expressed in images and texts alike. This cultural-historical study is part of a larger book project on Squirrels in Art.

Kunstchronik, 2019

Bericht über den aktuellen Stand der Tintoretto-Forschung nach dem Ausstellungsreigen anlässlich ... more Bericht über den aktuellen Stand der Tintoretto-Forschung nach dem Ausstellungsreigen anlässlich des 500. Geburtstagsjubiläums des Malers des Venezianischen Cinquecento. Gefragt wird v.a. nach Desideraten der Forschungsarbeit zu Jacopo Tintoretto.

Review of the exhibition on Veronese's Cuccina-cycle in Dresden on occasion of its recent restora... more Review of the exhibition on Veronese's Cuccina-cycle in Dresden on occasion of its recent restoration.

As early as 1557 Ludovico Dolce foresaw the end of the great Venetian painting tradition that he ... more As early as 1557 Ludovico Dolce foresaw the end of the great Venetian painting tradition that he believed had reached the apex of innovation and quality with the achievements of Titian. At the conclusion of Dolce's Dialogo della Pittura Aretino gives voice to this worry: " E di presente io temo, che la Pittura non torni a smarrirsi un'altra volta: percioche de' giovani non si vede risorgere alcuno, che dia speranza di dover pervenire a qualche honesta eccelllenza… " Dolce's proclamation of the end of what later became known as the golden period of Venetian Renaissance painting was also expressed by a number of writers after him, cementing the idea that subsequent to the deaths of Titian (1576), Veronese (1588) and Tintoretto (1594), Venetian painting fell into sharp decline. The panel seeks to break with the rhetorical trope of the death or Crisis of the Venetian Renaissance Tradition (Rosand) by focusing on the group of seven artists active in the first half of the Seicento described by the art critic Marco Boschini in his Breve Instruzione of the 1674 edition of Le ricche minere: " Da questi gran Maestri dell'Arte sono poi derivati infiniti Pittori di moltissima stima, ed in particolare ce ne sono al numero di sette, che hanno osservate le pedate di tre, cioè di Tiziano, del Tintoretto e di Paolo Veronese, e per questa cagione tengono molta simpatia fra di loro. Il Primo è Giacomo Palma il Giovine (così chiamato a distinzione del Vecchio); il secondo Leonardo Corona da Murano; il terzo Andrea Vicentino; il quarto Santo Peranda; il quinto Antonio Aliense; il sesto Pietro Malombra; il settimo Girolamo Pilotto. Molte volte, chi non è pratico del loro operare non è così pronto a farne di essi la distinzione. " Almost completely neglected by art history, Boschini coined the term Sette Maniere for these painters, grouping these individuals together due to the fact that their works were very difficult to distinguish from one another. The panel will consider counter-arguments to the accepted judgment of the abrupt end of the Venetian painting legacy at the end of the Cinquecento, and seeks to instead promote the idea of a continuity in the Venetian tradition in the Seicento. By focusing on the understudied, yet prolific group of artists of the Sette Maniere, we wish to shed new light on the artistic contributions they made to Venetian painting in the seventeenth century. This panel will also pose questions relating to the domination of the production of paintings in Venice by these artists in the Seicento, as well as considering artistic quality as the basis for art historical study. To put it bluntly, despite their ubiquity in Venice, have Palma il Giovane and his contemporaries been underrated, or are they simply not very good artists? Papers can address topics such as:-The life and works of each of the Sette Maniere artists: Palma il Giovane, Leonardo Corona, Andrea Vicentino, Sante Peranda, Antonio Vassilacchi (l'Aliense), Pietro Malombra and Girolamo Pilotto-The Sette Maniere artists as collectors-The Sette Maniere artists and the workshop-The Sette Maniere artists within the landscape of the Seconda Accademia Veneziana (founded 1593)-The Sette Maniere artists and the stylistic legacies of Tintoretto, Veronese and Titian-Counter-arguments to the art historical trope of the crisis in the Venetian tradition-New archival documents on any of the seven artists Please send an abstract (max. 150 words) and a short CV (max. 300 words) in a single PDF to M.Lillywhite.1@warwick.ac.uk and maria.aresin@googlemail.com by May 25, 2017.

Book Reviews by Maria Aresin

Medienimpulse, 2016

Maria Aresin rezensiert einen Sammelband zu Bildern der Liebe in der Frühen Neuzeit, wo- bei die ... more Maria Aresin rezensiert einen Sammelband zu Bildern der Liebe in der Frühen Neuzeit, wo- bei die Medien der Literatur und der bildenden Kunst im Zentrum stehen. Besonderes Augen- merk legt die Autorin dabei auf die Bedeutsamkeit von queertheoretischer Forschung für die Liebesbilder in der Frühen Neuzeit.
Reviewessay: Guth, Doris/Priedl, Elisabeth (eds) (2012): Bilder der Liebe. Liebe, Begehren und Geschlechterverhältnisse in der Kunst der Frühen Neuzeit, Bielefeld: transcript. (Images of Love. Love, Desire and Gender Relations in Early Modern Art). Maria Aresin reviews a volume on images of love in the early modern period, focusing on the media of literature and creative art. The author particularly emphasizes the importance of queer theory research for images of love in the early modern period.

Imaging Utopia, 2021

Animals and Courts, 2019

Kunstchronik, 2019

Medienimpulse, 2016

Maria Aresin rezensiert einen Sammelband zu Bildern der Liebe in der Frühen Neuzeit, wobei die Me... more Maria Aresin rezensiert einen Sammelband zu Bildern der Liebe in der Frühen Neuzeit, wobei die Medien der Literatur und der bildenden Kunst im Zentrum stehen. Besonderes Augenmerk legt die Autorin dabei auf die Bedeutsamkeit von queertheoretischer Forschung für die Liebesbilder in der Frühen Neuzeit.

This paper presents the venetian drawings on blue paper in the collection of the Staatliche Graph... more This paper presents the venetian drawings on blue paper in the collection of the Staatliche Graphische Sammlung Munich.
The drawings will be published in the catalogue of the venetian drawings and prints (upcoming 2022)

“Lasciate ogni Speranza [voi ch’entrate]” (“Abandon all hope, ye who enter here”) is a phrase tha... more “Lasciate ogni Speranza [voi ch’entrate]” (“Abandon all hope, ye who enter here”) is a phrase that can be found on numerous drawings by the Venetian artist Palma il Giovane (1548– 1628). Hidden between figures of saints and shipwrecks this quote of the most famous line of Dante’s Divine Comedy (Inferno III:9) seems to form a plea, an expression of despair, that Palma must have suffered from. It can be seen as an effort to liberate his mind by the gesture of the hand in a way similar to the use Palma’s biographer Carlo Ridolfi described for his efforts in drawing, when he said that the artist used the pen “to unburden his heart from the capriccio” (“per isfogare il capriccio”). Similar quotes and references – from Psalms to Aristotle – appear within Palma’s graphic oeuvre, leaving the onlooker puzzled as to what their meaning and function might have been. On other pages the artist is exploring the paper as a playground filling the page with seemingly meaningless scribbles that upon closer examination turn out to include witty faces and grimaces. This paper will examine the role of scripture and scribbles in relation to drawn figures in works on paper by Palma il Giovane following in the footsteps of theories on the correlation of writing and drawing by David Rosand.

Bleeding paper – The use of red oil paint on Tintoretto’s workshop drawings Amongst the drawings... more Bleeding paper – The use of red oil paint on Tintoretto’s workshop drawings

Amongst the drawings by Tintoretto and his workshop there are some twenty sheets showing figure studies on the recto and tracings made with reddish brown oil paint of the same figure on the verso. Sometimes these tracings appear also on the recto, covering the black chalk contour lines of the body shapes with pasty paint. Only the outlines are rendered or copied as if to create a plain stencil of the figures position without highlighting or adding also the inner volumes of the portly body or muscular silhouette. It seems that no other artist of the time in Venice used this particular technique and its function remains unclear until today as these drawings while being kept in famous drawing collections (Uffizi, Morgan Library, British Museum, Royal Collection) have yet to be studied.
The talk will focus exclusively on these drawings and seeks to explore their appearance and making from a practical as well as from a theoretical point of view. In the practical part the handling of the drawings in the workshop from which these kind of renderings surely must derive will be discussed. The second step will allow a confrontation of the first results of the practical examination with the art theoretical literature especially concerning methods of tracing and copying of compositions, to arrive at a conclusion on how red colored tracings can be interpreted in terms of their function.

This paper will be published with the conference proceedings.

Catching squirrels From the Middle Ages until the 19th century squirrels were popular pets espec... more Catching squirrels

From the Middle Ages until the 19th century squirrels were popular pets especially for woman and children. In order to keep them, they first needed to be caught and tamed. This 20-minutes paper aims to shed light on the practice of squirrel keeping by explaining strategies of catching and taming squirrels by means of hunting treatises such as the Livres du Roy Modus from the 14th century. Herein three types of squirrel traps and hunting methods are explained in lengthy passages and illustrated by small miniatures. The instructions given do serve not only to catch squirrels for pet keeping, but also to control overpopulation. The texts will be compared to images of squirrel catching from the Middle Ages to the Early Modern times. After catching the squirrel, the small creature needed to be tamed to become a suitable pet. Natural history treatises such as Conrad Gessner’s Thierbuch do provide information about rather unrealistic taming methods, which should be discussed in the second part of the presentation. As beloved pets, squirrels were kept in small cages and huts in the household and mostly in the chamber of their holders. The final part of the presentation will be dedicated to these material items – such as cages, huts, leashes and collars – related to squirrel keeping, that are documented in surviving objects, portrait paintings and other imagery.

The talk discusses the artistic production of Paolo Fiammingo starting from his time in Tintorett... more The talk discusses the artistic production of Paolo Fiammingo starting from his time in Tintoretto’s workshop to his later production until his early death in 1596. The focus mostly is on the serial production of mythological topics in Fiammingo’s œuvre: he mainly painted series of paintings (four ages of man, five senses, seven planets, four seasons …) and reproduced them many times in different formats. At the same time he also painted many paintings, that appear to be unique in composition (such as the two scenes from the Argonautica in the National Gallery in London) and which will be discussed in comparison to the “mass production” of the series.
These reproductions were executed with the help of workshop assistants of which unfortunately only one, Dirck de Vries, is today known by name.
Despite this little evidence the talk seeks to explore the workshop practice starting from the material opening up to questions of Fiammingo’s technique [how are the reproductions made: role of cartoons and (squared) preparatory drawings, canvas sizes, etc.] and questions of the art market for which these paintings were made (clients in Venice and Oltralpe and their specific needs and requests) as well as Paolo Fiammingo’s Flemish/German-Venetian network (assistants, artists, committenti …).
I’d like to discuss a lot of newly found paintings, a cartoon and a new drawing. This material is part of an on-going project on Paolo Fiammingo’s workshop practice that derived from a chapter in my dissertation but should future wise result in a revision of Stefania Mason’s monographic article on Fiammingo, not only by adding a lot of works recently found in museum collections and on the art market, but also by going beyond the classical biographic examination and by analysing and contextualizing the artistic practice of Paolo Fiammingo.

“I disegni fatti da lui in qualunque genere […] furono infiniti (…)” With this brief line Palma’s... more “I disegni fatti da lui in qualunque genere […] furono infiniti (…)” With this brief line Palma’s biographer Ridolfi summarizes the artist’s notable output in the field of drawing, apparently overwhelmed by the sheer amount of drawings left behind by the painter. Ridolfi’s sentiments are echoed by art historians today, as the numerous drawings by Palma can be found dispersed throughout museums and private collections worldwide. The aim of this talk is to focus on the long overlooked corpus of Palma’s drawings, with a particular focus on some isolated and outstanding cases within his graphic œuvre such as: gilded highlighting, notes, scribbles, personal memories, correspondence on the drawings verso, corrections, the use of grids as a technique derived from his experience in Tintoretto’s studio, as well as citations from poets such as Dante, all of which constitute important elements in Palma’s drawing styles and processes.

Drei Künstler haben die Technik der Radierung revolutioniert: Jacques Callot, der mit der Échoppe... more Drei Künstler haben die Technik der Radierung revolutioniert:
Jacques Callot, der mit der Échoppe ein völlig neues Radierinstrument erfand; Stefano della Bella, der es als Erster wagte, bloße Skizzen im Druck zu vervielfältigen; und Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione, der mit der Monotypie ein neues Druckverfahren entwickelte. Die Radierung und ihre drei maßgeblichen Protagonisten stehen im Zentrum dieses Bandes.
Ein Jahrhundert nach ihrer Erfindung erlebt die Radierung im 17. Jahrhundert ihre barocke Blüte. Ihren wenngleich späten Erfolg verdankt die Drucktechnik der Freiheit der Linie. Anders als in der mühsamen Manier des Kupferstichs kann die Hand des Künstlers oder der Künstlerin
die Zeichnung beim Radieren spielerisch leicht umsetzen. Die Publikation gewährt gewährt faszinierende Einblicke in die Arbeitsprozesse und Ästhetik barocker Druckgraphik.
Mit Beiträgen von Ad Stijnman, Marion Heisterberg und Stefan Morét.

The relationship between disegno (drawing or design) and Venetian art has historically been a pro... more The relationship between disegno (drawing or design) and Venetian art has historically been a problematic one. Giorgio Vasari’s notion that painters from Venice and the Veneto were mainly focused on colore and not trained in or accustomed to drawing became a commonplace in the literature on Venetian art. The title of this book, Venetian Disegno, would for him imply an unacceptable paradox. This view can no longer be sustained in light of modern scholarship, and it is clear that drawing played a crucial role in the education and the artistic practice of artists from Venice and the Veneto region. From the fifteenth onwards, drawing was a vital form of expression in Venice. With contributions by 23 leading scholars and curators, Venetian Disegno offers a fresh perspective on Venetian art, illustrating the importance of disegno and the study of drawings for artistic practices in the lagoon city.