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
Unwrapping an Icon 