By using this website you agree to our Cookie policy

November 2019

Vol. 161 | No. 1400

Sculpture

Editorial

Lifting the dead hand

Lawyers are familiar with the phrase ‘the dead hand shall not rule’, which expresses the belief that testators should not be able to impose terms that control what will happen to their bequests long after their deaths. The phrase is frequently applied to a different sort of issue, the conditions on which a gift is accepted from its donor. 

Editorial read more
Free review

William Blake. Tate Britain, London

As bookends to Tate’s first major William Blake exhibition in nearly two decades, the curators, Martin Myrone and Amy Concannon, have chosen two single-sheet works, each small yet full of visual energy: Albion rose (cat. no.1; Fig.16) and ‘Europe’ plate I: frontispiece‘The Ancient of Days’ (in the Manchester impression, supposedly coloured by Blake in the final days of his 

Free review read more
  • Virgin and Child ('Gilded Virgin') from the south transept portal of Amiens Cathedral

    An unfinished mid-thirteenth-century ‘Virgin and Child’ from Saint-Germain-des-Prés, Paris

    By Xavier Dectot
  • Winged trumpeter from the font in the baptistery of Siena Cathedral, by Donatello

    Donatello, musical sculpture, and the shock of sound

    By Amy R. Bloch
  • Detail of Triumphant Perseus, by Antonio Canova, showing the head of Medusa

    Canova’s copper head of Medusa

    By Melissa L. Gustin
  • The Albert Memorial Chapel, Windsor Castle, Berkshire, by George Washington Wilson

    Henry de Triqueti’s ‘Vase of dreams’

    By Richard Dagorne,Alicia Robinson
  • Portrait of a woman, by Frans Hals

    Supplementing the eye: the technical analysis of Frans Hals’s paintings – i

    By Anna Tummers