Rosie Thorp in conversation with the Project Team Rosie: You no longer believe the painting to be by El Greco – can you explain more about why you’ve decided this? Pippa: Our extensive programme of research on the painting followed on from the technical analysis of it carried out in Madrid in 2014 at the … Continue reading Preliminary Findings on the Lady in a Fur Wrap
Reattribution to Alonso Sánchez Coello
As a result of our collaborative Unwrapping an Icon project, we are now satisfied that all the evidence of stylistic and technical examination points to Alonso Sánchez Coello (c. 1531-88), principal portrait painter to Philip II of Spain, as the artist of the Lady in a Fur Wrap. The reattribution of this famous masterpiece has … Continue reading Reattribution to Alonso Sánchez Coello
The Symposium, February 2019
It’s been a busy time for the project! Our international symposium was held from February 20th-22nd 2019. Contributors from around the world met to discuss and present findings from research into Lady in the Fur Wrap and the related Spanish portraits. These included: Patrick Dietemann, Doerner Institut, Munich Stefan Zumbühl, University of Applied Sciences, … Continue reading The Symposium, February 2019
A Big Thank-You to our Helpers!
Our main post by Rosie this time concerns our Project Symposium in February. It was an intensive affair, with many international contributors covering a wide range of disciplines. This, of course, also meant it required a lot of organisation, which we simply couldn’t have done without our wonderful team of curatorial interns and postgraduate students. … Continue reading A Big Thank-You to our Helpers!
Interview with project volunteer, Clémence Aycard
Hi Clémence! Firstly, can you introduced yourself to our readers? Hi! My name is Clémence Aycard, and I’m a French volunteer working with Pippa Stephenson at Glasgow Museums. After three years in Bordeaux (south of France) for a bachelor in art history and archaeology, I went to Paris to study for a Masters at … Continue reading Interview with project volunteer, Clémence Aycard
Photographing the Project II
In this post we continue looking at photography of the portraits in our Unwrapping an Icon project. Sir William Stirling Maxwell was a pioneer of photography of art and the reproduction of art through techniques that were then new and experimental. As mentioned in our introductory post for this blog, his Annals of the Artists … Continue reading Photographing the Project II
Reconstructing the Veil
In this post we present a one-minute film made by Joe Briffa during the Unwrapping an Icon Dress and Jewellery Workshop at the V&A in February this year. In it Hilary Davidson, a fashion historian and curator from the University of Sydney, gives her interpretation of the veil depicted in the portrait of the Lady in a Fur … Continue reading Reconstructing the Veil
Examining an ‘Arranged Pair’: the Portraits of Philip II and Anne of Austria
This month has seen further technical examination of two of the Stirling Maxwell Collection portraits in the ‘Unwrapping an Icon’ project. This is to help us to deepen our understanding of the techniques and materials being used in the studio of Alonso Sánchez Coello in sixteenth-century Spain and to compare our findings with those for … Continue reading Examining an ‘Arranged Pair’: the Portraits of Philip II and Anne of Austria
Photographing the Project
In this post, we continue to unwrap the ways in which we’re documenting our project by looking at how it’s being photographed. Nowadays, and especially in our digital age when we all have cameras we take photography for granted. But photography of art, and in this case paintings, is a highly specialised skill – as … Continue reading Photographing the Project
Filming the Project
Documentation is an important part of any research project. On our Unwrapping an Icon project, we’re privileged – and very grateful – to have filmmaker Joe Briffa to help us to capture some of the highlight events and record the methods we’re using to collect information. Not many projects of our relatively small scale and … Continue reading Filming the Project