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. 

Some Recently Published Research on Portraits

Filippo Lippi: Portrait of a woman with a Man at a Casement, c. 1440. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

A re-evaluation of Fra Filippo Lippi’s double-portrait in the Metropolitan Museum, New York

In an important new article in the Metropolitan Museum Journal, Katalin Prajda (Central European University, Budapest) makes a convincing case for re-identifying the sitters in Filippo Lippi’s well-known double-portrait, the so-called Portrait of a Woman with a Man at a Casement. They have traditionally been identified as Agnola di Bernardo Sapiti and her husband, Lorenzo di Rinieri Scolari, based on the coat of arms under the male sitter’s hands, which is that of the Scolari family. Prajda questions this identification, particularly as there was a considerable age difference between the couple, somewhere between twelve and twenty-four years (Agnola was born c. 1422; Lorenzo’s exact birth-date is not known but he was born between 1398 and 1410). Moreover, the pictorial elements of the portrait are all subordinate to the female sitter; she is the focus of the painting and the dominant figure within it. Prajda therefore suggests that it is she who is the member of the Scolari family rather than her companion.