Melbourne Portrait Group Seminar | Adam Bushby

Gentile Bellini (attr.), Portrait of Sultan Mehmet II (1480). National Gallery, London.

Adam Bushby, ‘El Gran Turco: Ottoman Turks in Venetian painting, 1453-1571′.

Monday 11 August, 6:30pm.

New Books | Portraits in Revolutionary France & A Portrait by Sebastiano del Piombo restored

Amy Freund, Portraiture and Politics in Revolutionary France (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2014), ISBN 978-0-271-06194-8.

A new book by Amy Freund, Assistant Professor of Art at Texas Christian University, explores the political and cultural role of the portrait in France at the beginning of the nineteenth century. 

Portraiture and Politics

The London Evening Standard reports that British MPs have spent £250,000 of public money on official portraits of their colleagues. The response, deliberately framed within the context of Britain’s current regime of financial austerity, has been unsurprisingly—and rather unimaginatively—critical. Jonathan Isaby, chief executive of the campaign group Taxpayers’ Alliance, for instance, has described the expenditure as “an expensive vanity project” and the Evening Standard dubs it a spending ‘spree’ in which MPs ‘splurged’ taxpayers’ money.