Guido Reni (Italian, 1575-1642) is one of the more important figures in the Pantheon of art history. He was born shortly after the Council of Trent, where the Catholic Church proposed sweeping changes to the arts in an attempt combat rising Protestantism. Reni became a leading proponent of a new aesthetic that clearly told stories through the use of  large-scale religious and historical figures.

The mid-sixteenth-century Mannerist artists that dominated Catholic tastes exemplified the kind of extravagant pomposity that many Protestants associated with the errors of the Catholic Church. The Council of Trent proposed art become a more popular and personal medium, where average people could understand the subjects. (At a time when less thatn 25 percent of the population was literate, painting was a remarkably effective means for communicating doctrine and propaganda.) The result was a flowering of new artists that looked towards the more-orderly compositional ethic of the high renaissance, in particular Raphael, Titian and Michelangelo. Guido Reni was a student at one of the most successful school of art, the Accademia degli Incamminati, that came to dominate the new artistic climate.

Members of the Accademie championed a new aesthetic of full, heroic-sized figures that filled canvases from top to bottom. By comparison to artists working just decades before, Reni's paintings seem remarkably bare, usually  featuring only one or two figures whose identities are made known through small, symbolic gestures.

A student of the Carracci Brothers, who founded the Accademie, Reni was perhaps the school's most successful alumnus. In his lifetime, he was patronized by cardinal and popes. In death, his works were among the most widely collected of all the Old Masters, ensuring that his personal aesthetic influenced several successive generations of artists.

Happy Birthday, Maestro.

It is no surprise that taste and knowledge sometimes go hand in hand. But claiming a preference for Bach or Bruce Springsteen can be directly correlated with one's social status (e.g. education, wealth, social connections) seems patronizing at best. So, when the social scientist Pierre Bourdieu published Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, he was considered an elitist snob. Bourdieu summarizes the book by writing:

"Taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier."

Distinction was recommended to me by a professor who made the argument that abstract art and neoclassicism had essentially the same goals and audience: both genres were far-removed from reality and steeped in symbolic messages. The intended audiences were the elite and hyper-educated. The notion that Jacques-Louis David and Pollock could share the same audience seemed laughable at the time. Yet, Bourdieu's data and cogent analysis seem to confirm the comparison.

First published in 1979 in French, Distinction is based on an extensive survey of 1,217 adults from a variety of social backgrounds, careers, and levels of education. Bourdieu's team of researchers asked participants about tastes in music, literature, movies, art, and food. Graphing responses according to social markings revealed fascinating patterns. For example:

• Industrial workers with associates degrees preferred listening to Edith Piaf, paintings by Renoir and eating at buffets. They were the least likely to visit museums or read books.
• Those with four-year degrees were drawn to the singer Jacques Brel, Goya, Van Gogh, and abstract painting.
• Craftsmen–those with specialized, non-formal training–admired Raphael, Leonardo Da Vinci and Watteau as artists and enjoyed popular music from America.
• The most educated respondents, university professors, named Bach as their overwhelmingly favorite composer and listed Picasso, Braque, Brueghel and Dalí as preferred artists.

In the introduction, Bourdieu summarizes his conclusions:

" . . . working-class people expect every image to explicitly perform a fucntion, if only that of a signe, and their judgements make reference, often explicitly, to the norms of morality or agreeableness. Whether rejecting or praising, their appreciation always has an ethical basis."

He constrasts this with another approach to art:

"The denial of lower, coarse, vulgar, venal, servile–in a word, natural–enjoyment, which constitutes the sacred sphere of culture, implies an affirmation of the superiority of those who can be satisfied with the sublimated, refined, disinterested gratuitous, distinguished pleasures forever closed to the profane."

Bourdieu is obviously taking sides, justifying a commonly-held belief that realistic, spiritual, moral, or sentimental works of art are preferred by those who are less educated and "vulgar."

Often, when I share with other art historians or professionals that my current work is on nineteenth-century academic painting, I am met with Bourdieu-esque comments that reflect the belief of the superiority of almost anything but academic painting, including folk or primitive arts. The dismissal of the academic aesthetic has become so pervasive that the study of it seems either Quixotic, which would mean it retains some inherent value; or, as is most often the case, idiotic. History painting, realism, and naturalism–all distinct and hotly debated in their time–are now lumped together and disdainfully labelled as "popular." I have come to wear that as a badge of honor, which puts me in direct opposition to many of Bourdieu's conclusions.

At their most fundamental Bourdieu's conclusions assume that humanity's greatest truths are complicated and that the abstraction of ideas is the most direct path to understanding the "sacred sphere" where truth resides. I do not believe this. I love the Well Tempered Clavier and Dagnan-Bouveret.

Whatever your opinion of its conclusions, Distinction is a remarkable read. I found myself alternatively patting myself on the back and writing angry marginalia.

In Goethe's Faust, Mephistopheles takes Faust to a mountain where he witnesses a Witch's Sabbath (a.k.a. Witch's Shabbat). The unholy meeting of demons and humans featured satanic offerings and resulted in plagues. Stories of these gatherings have a long history in European literature. (For more, go here.) The women who attend are traditionally skyclad, a ritual nudity practiced by pagans and witches.

This work is scandalous by most people's sensibilities–including mine–however, it is illustrative of contradictory attitude towards nudity in nineteenth century France and  most of western society.  At a time when it was shameful to see a woman's ankles in public, it was somehow acceptable for more-than-suggestive works featuring nudity, as long as the narrative was tied to some redeemable theme.

This selective bias bias is perhaps best illustrated in the debate between Alexandre Cabanel's The Birth of Venus (1863) and Édouard Manet's Olympia (1863). Both featured nude woman and were accepted to the same national contest where they were exhibited to the public.

But, while Cabanel's was considered to be a critical success and continuation of the classical tradition, Manet's was seen as obscene for its realistic approach to the female nude.

In his day, Luis Ricardo Faléro (Spanish, 1851-1896) was a consumately trained academic painter, whose work fit soundly within the contraditions of his time. His works were prized for their thinly-vieled eroticism. But, collectors could maintain their reputation by pointing to the "merit" of their subjects.

The recent exhibition, Acts of Mercy, at the National Gallery has brought well-deserved attention to Federick Cayley Robinson (British, 1862-1927). Despite his remarkable abilities and relationship with still-celebrated artists, the majority of Robinson's works are in museum storage or private collections.

(Like works reproduced on this blog,  these paintings are three dimensional objects. In person the vibrancy of Robinson's colors and his painterly skills are undeniable and electric.)

Robinson studied at the Academy of St. Johns Wood before being accepted to London's Royal Academy under Frederic Lord Leighton (British, 1830-1896). He continued to develop his abilities, first at the Academie Julien in France for three years and, then, in Florence.

Robinson moved back the UK to take a teaching position at Glasgow University, where he became a friend and collaborator with members of the Glasgow Boys. But, before taking his post, Robinson travelled to Newlyn, England at the peak of Stanhope Forbes' (British, 1857-1947) career. Like Forbes, Robinson's work was dominated by fisherman, farmers, and shepherds. But, unlike the Newlyn School, which took inspiration from French Naturalism and Jules Bastien Lepage, in particular, Robinson was heavily influence by the Symbolist Pierre Puvis de Chavannes (French, 1824-1898).

In To Pastures New, Robinson creates an homage to the French artist by reversing Chanvannes' composition in The Poor Fisherman.

Robinson's greatest work was a series of paintings commissioned for the Middlesex Hospital. Spanning more than 15-feet each, the four panels of Acts of Mercy are a tour de force of skill, demonstrating Robinson's enormous arsenal of skills and classical vocabulary. He combines the sensibilities of a classicist–deriving poses and motifs from greco-roman sculpture and compositions borrowed Giotto's frescoes–and the subjects from contemporary life. His subjects are orphans and veterans of World War I cared for by the hospital. Aesthetically, it is both contemporary and timeless. A

s commentary on charity, Acts of Mercy is, as my friend and mentor Dr. Tom Gretton commented, a masterclass in receiving charity: how it is given and how it is received. Robinson captures a large spectrum of human relationships in this and in all his works I have been able to see. While Middlesex Hospital has been torn down and the show has now ended at the National Gallery, Acts of Mercy has a new home: the Wellcome Collection.

One of the world's great experts, Gordon Lang, has died. He passed in his sleep on October 9.

Gordon was one of the world's foremost authorities of European and Asian ceramics. He dedicated the last and best years of his life to teaching new generations of experts, who are now writers, dealers, curators and directors of museums all over the world. Despite mastering a bewildering array of disciplines (e.g. history, chemistry, anthropology, geography, iconography, engineering), Gordon was remarkably humble; more at home in a pub than a library. He loved nothing more than going sharing a larger with his students.

Born in Scotland and trained as an engineer, Gordon worked in Sotheby's department of ceramics before taking a teaching post at Sotheby's Institute of Art. He worked for the auction house at a time when the science of ceramics converged with aesthetic appreciation.The resulting flood of market interest fueled both a new generation of collectors and forgerers.  Gordon handled tens of thousands of objects, developing an unmatched, highly-sought-after ability to distinguish wheat from the chaff. His books, Wrestling Boys: Catalogue of the Exhibition of Chinese & Japanese Ceramics from the 16th to the 18th Century in the Collection at Burghley House and The Powell Cotton Collection of Chinese Ceramics, are essential manuals for serious scholars and collectors.

Just before learning about Gordon death, I had sent him an email. I was hoping to see the new ceramics galleries at the Victoria & Albert Museum, followed by dinner. Instead, I met with friends to talk about how generous Gordon had been to all of us.

With art historians earnestly looking for prominent female artists, it is surprising that so little is written about Fanny Fleury (French, 1848-1920). With the exception of Rosa Bonheur (French, 1822-1899), Fleury was perhaps the most successful female exhibitor in the history of the Paris Salon, having works accepted consistently from 1869 to 1882, and in many afterwards. She also exhibited at the Salons of Saint-Etienne and Dijon, and received an honorable mention at the Exposition Universelle of 1889.

Fleury's academic credentials are impeccable. She studied with Jean-Jacques Henner (French, 1829-1905) and was later accepted to the École des Beaux-Arts as a student of Carolus-Duran (French, 1837-1917), where she was a classmate of John Singer Sargent (American, 1856-1925). (Speaking of her work at the 1884 Salon, one critic said Fleury had "equalled her masters," Henner and Duran.)  Highly regarded by her peers, Fluery was elected an Officer of the Academie and an associate of the Société des artistes français.

Yet, for all her accomplishments in well-documented institutions and events, there is surprisingly little information currently available about the life and work of Fleury. (This is another instance where I am writing about an artists in hopes that it encourages others to contact me with additional information.)

Fleury was born outside Paris in either 1843 or 1848–most sources agree on the latter. It is possible–I stress "possible" for lack of form documentation, yet a great deal of circumstancial evidence–she is the daughter of Joseph Nicolas Robert-Fleury (French, 1797-1890), a successful history painter and on-time director of the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris and Rome; and, his son, the painter Tony Robert-Fleury (French, 1837-1912), who was also successful painter and who replaced Bougeureau as the Director of the  Société des artistes français (If anyone can shed additional light, it would be greatly appreciated.) When she married, Fanny Fluery became Fanny Laurent Fleury; but, never included "Laurent" in her signature. So, whether or not there is an actual genetic connection between the three Fluerys, they must have come into contact with one another through the Acadamie.

It has been difficult to piece together a continuum of Fleury's production with the few works and accounts left to us. It appears that for a time–presumably early in her career–she created a number of still lives.

Under Carolus-Duran, Fleury distinguished herself as a portraitist. Her large-scale work Bebe dort (1884) exhibited in the Salon of 1884 along with Madame X by her classmate John Singer Sargent. Both pieces belie the the influence Corolus-Duran, who often combined monumental human figures in contemporary settings.

In Bebe dort (1884), a mother–perhaps a self-portrait of the artist–cradles her child, sitting together next to a cradle. Behind the figures, on the wall Fluery places a print of a business being ransacked by a mob. No one would imagine that scene actually being hung in a child's room. It is a clever use of a picture-within-a-picture, used often by Netherlandish painters in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, to create greater or multiple meanings within a work. The juxtaposition of the two scenes contrasts security and comfort of home with a threatening world.

At some point, Fleury set aside society portraits and dedicated herself to Breton scenes. In 1892, The American Magazine wrote:

Realism has likewise tempted another artists of great talent, Mme. Fanny Fleury. It is to the desolate lands of Lower Brittany that Mmde. Fleury goes for her subjects. She has painted som admirable marine scenes, but excels in depicting types of peasantry . . . every summer she goes to the seacoast, and in some retired cornes, unfrequentd by the tourist, prepares her picture for the next Salon. (The American Magazine, Vol. 34. New York: Frank Leslie Publishing House, 1892; p, 430.)

The quality of her work combined with her credentials certainly raise questions about the current dearth of readily-available information on Fleury's life and the location of her works. All signs point to a productive career. From contemporary records, we know that her works were regularly purchased from Salon galleries, and that her works were found in various French and American museum collections–none of which currently list those works in their public inventories.

Whatever the reason for Fanny Fleury's undeserved, forgotten status, she will only gain prominence as her works are rediscovered.

Many obituaries have been written since his death four days ago. Rather than repeat the long lists of accomplishments printed in numerous obituaries (NY Times, for example), I'd like to share a personal experience I had with Arnold Friberg five years ago, when he was 91.

My wife and I were invited to have dinner with Arnold and his wife, Heidi, at their home. Heidi cooked. Afterwards, we sat, talked about art, and walked through Arnold's studio. For a man of any age–let alone 91–Arnold was full of energy. He hopped out of his seat to punctuate a passionate thought about Jean-Auguste Dominique Ingres (French, 1780-1867), whom he felt had been unfairly treated by historical memory. (How appropriate it was when Susan Siegfried's bookIngres: Painting Reimagined was delivered to my house the same day Friberg died.)

As we toured his studio, Friberg lifted an original oil painting he had done for a Christmas edition of the Saturday Evening Post. "Unlike my colleagues," he said "I painted a perfect reindeer."

"I would look for the perfect antlers on one reindeer, the perfect eyes from another, nose from another; and, then, I combined them. Other artists don't do that."

Perhaps knowingly, perhaps not, Friberg's self-described "perfectionism" was, in practice, akin to the Ideal reached for by Ingres. Friberg was tirelessly detailed. His work often featured elaborate script applied by hand without the use of stencils. Even at his advanced age, Friberg could be found working in his studio, touching and re-touching works, which, in his mind, could always be improved.

We spent several hours looking through his catalogue of works. Any artist would be satisfied to have so many memorable and widely-reproduced works. Yet, Friberg had an air of anxious energy. "I'm happiest when working," he told me.

Wherever he is now, I'm sure that Arnold Friberg will not sit back and enjoy what will surely be a growing reputation. He is probably sorting through cherubs, looking for which one has the best wings, eyes, lips, etc.

Recently, I was asked to judge the annual Springville Museum of Art Spring Salon. The contest has taken place for nearly 90 years, with over 2,000 annual submissions exclusively from full-time artists.

For a full PDF catalogue, click below:

• Full Catalogue LARGE size (30 mb)–featuring higher quality images of each work.
• Full Catalogue, REDUCED size (2 mb)–Due to the reduction, some images my not appear in true color.

I thought it would be fun to create a nineteenth-century-style critical catalogue for the event, in the tradition of the catalogues that used to be made for the Paris Salons. So, I teamed up with a good friend and thoughtful writer, Philipp Malzl, to write on selected works from the contest. Neither of us have worked as critics before. But, we don't know about any models for the kind of art criticism we would like to see.

Each review is brief–some are a sentence, others three paragraphs. Our intent was to create something readable and entertaining for a large audience–artists and non-artists–and not for an elite audience. At the same time, we wanted to educate by tying contemporary art into a larger tradition that is often ignored or not understood by many contemporary artists and critics who only know art as far back as the beginning of the twentieth century.

I haven't sent it out to many people yet. This is what I would consider a "preliminary draft." I wold be very interested in knowing what you think about it.

I don't know if anyone else is doing anything like this right now, especially for contemporary art in the classical tradition. If this catalogue is truly insightful, I hope it is the first of many.

___

Recently, I received an email from a BeardedRoman reader asking me for list of books on my nightstand. I thought I would post my answer here. And, I would love to know what is on your nightstand too.

I regularly get book recommendations from readers, and I love it.  Through their suggestions and my own research projects, over the years I have built a large library. (At last count, I have nearly 1,500 books.) I have books piled by bed and all around my house. No, I have not read all of them–some were only bought for a single, useful chapter. Other I have read multiple times.

The books I have listed below are literally the ones that have been by my bed. I have my finger in every one of them and have been bouncing between them all for weeks. They don't necessarily relate to any current work I am doing–that's another pile. These are what I am reading for fun. As I made the list, I was surprised at how many were directly related to art history. (No wonder I am boring at parties.) But, as you can see from the list, my second love is poetry.

____

After naming the book and the author, I have written a very brief personal impression of each book.

1. Titian: The Last Days by Mark Hudson. There are few straight biographies of Titian. Most that I have read are a scholarly studies of the artist's works combined with political and social commentary that would not be anything like reading the biography of, say, Benjamin Franklin. I've learned something about time an place from Hudson's book; but, overall I have struggled to get through it. Hudson seems to be as interested in talking about himself as he is about Titian.
2. French Art in Nineteenth-Century Britain by Edward Morris. This is a great study of the relationship between the French and British at a time when the great international arms race was the arts. France was winning and the British couldn't help but admire the art it.
3. Hopes and Fears for Art by William Morris. Morris was the philosophical and moral leader of the Arts & Crafts movement that was a reaction against industrialization. This is an impassioned lecture he gave in defense of his movement.
4. Master of Shadows by Mark Lamster. This biography of Rubens is one of the best books I have read on any subject in a long time. Weaving together Rubens with the political and artistic dramas of his time, it is clear that the artist was as much a diplomat as a painter. I fell in love with Rubens again; both his art and his humanity.
5. A Theory of Craft: Function and Aesthetic Expression by Kenneth R. Trapp. Lately, I've been obsessed with the role of craftsmanship versus concept in art. Does the way somethings is made matter; or, is it the final product that counts?
6. The End of the Salon: Art and the State in the Early Third Republic by Patricia Mainardi. A very good discussion on how one of the most important institutions in the history of art fizzled out.
7. The Craftsman's Handbook (Il Libro dell'Arte) by Cennino d'Andrea Cennini, trans. by Daniel V. Thompson, Jr. Perhaps one of the most widely-read handbooks for artists, this book is a lot of fun to read. Cennini wasn't always accurate; but, he does give an important insight into the practical considerations of making art in 15th-century Florence.
8. The Materials of the Artist and their Use in Painting by Mac Doerner. So much of art history is about social and political history. I am anxious to learn more about the objects and how they were and art made.
9. Consider the Lobster and Other Essays by David Foster Wallace. A recommendation from a friend, I cried while reading his essay on Dostoevsky.
10. Velázquez by Aureliano de Beruete (Foreword by Léon Bonnat). Bonnat wrote the foreword just after being made Director of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris. His first sentence: "I was brought up in the worship of Velázquez."
11. Patterns of Intention: On the Historical Explanation of Pictures by Michael Baxandall. Baxandall shatters me with almost every sentence. He has changed the way I've thought about paintings. Example: " . . . to say  we 'explain a picture as covered by a description' can conveniently be seen as another way of saying that we explain, first, thoughts we have had about the picture, and only secondarily the picture."
12. Emulation: David, Drouais, and Girodet in the Art of Revolutionary France by Thomas Crow. An amazing recreation of the events and journals of three of the most influential painters of the nineteenth-century. Very thoughtful.
13. A Face to the World: on Self-Portraits by Laura Cumming. I wish I had written this book! Cumming writes about why artists make self-portraits and why we love looking at them.
14. Essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson. I have been reading his essay "The Poet" over and over again. It's like scripture: each reading gets more meaningful.
15. Seeing through Paintings by Andrea Kirsh and Rustin S. Levenson. A chemical analysis by two scientists on how art is made.
16. The Infinity of Lists by Umberto Eco. Ever want to know how many demons have ever been named in Western literature? The basic premise of the book is that there is a history of list making in Western literature. From the Bible and Homer to Joyce, the lists say something about our culture. It's a surprising and entertaining read.
17. Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy by Michael Baxandall. My favorite quote: "Art was too important for artists."
18. Seven Days in the Art World by Sarah Thornton. This is an mind-blowing, anthropological travelogue of the people who make, buy, and sell modern and contemporary art. Thornton is able to sit down with people and get candid reactions that made we alternatively laugh and want to reach through the page and strangle her interviewees.
19. The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure and Human Evolution by Denis Dutton. A discussion on why humans like art.
20. Tiepolo Pink by Robert Calasso. Late in his career, Tiepolo did a series of 36 bizarre etchings that are rarely seen or discussed. This is a book about them.
21. The Sight of Death: An Experiment in Art Writing by T. J. Clark. For several months, Clark works at the Getty Museum and sees the same paintings by Poussin day after day. This is his journal on impressions he had looking at them. It is amazing! The things he sees, the ideas he has, and the way he looks at these paintings have changed me. I want to be more like Clark. He is as much a poet as  art historian.
22. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste by Pierre Bourdieu. While it is a few decades old, Distinction's basic premise is: your education and birth are the predominant indicators of why you like the music, food, and art you do.
23. Painters and Public Life in Eighteenth-Century Paris by Thomas E. Crow. Great study on how artists joined the age of mass media.
24. Ingres: Painting Reimagined by Susan L. Siegfried. I just got this, and haven't read much. But, it promises to be a new and controversial look at Ingres. Siegfried's goals are to examine in depth Ingres' history and genre paintings, which are largely ignored or dismissively categorized.
25. Ballistics: Poems by Billy Collins. I have all of Collins' books of poetry.
26. Los Versos del Capitan (Captain's Verses) by Pablo Neruda. I lived in Chile. Reading Neruda lets me slip back there, if only for a little while.
27. Death in the Afternoon by Earnest Hemingway. This is a non-fiction book about bullfighting. As a result of studying Spanish painting, I have to know more about it. Bullfights (corridas) and bullfighters (toreros) are just part of the culture. I went to a bull fight last year at Las Ventas in Madrid. Since then, I've been trying to understand what happened and how I feel about it.
28. Blizzard of One by Mark Strand. I have not even cracked it open yet.

As those of you who follow my tweets (apologies for the shameless Twitter plug) know, I have been traveling for the past three weeks. I was in Spain for eleven days, France for one, and another five in California. To some it might sound like glamorous, Indiana-Jonesing; but, in reality, I spent most days underground in dusty archives looking for undiscovered, art-historical morsels and nights transcribing nineteenth-century handwriting. Along the way, I came across a number of remarkable works of art, some not seen for more than a hundred years. I plan to share some of them. I begin with A Scene from Pompeii (1868), a previously unpublished and little-known work by Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema (Dutch and British, 1836-1912).

This morning, I spoke with Vern Swanson, a mentor of mine and author of Alma-Tadema's catalogue raisonné. Dr. Swanson did not include an illustration of the painting in his book–the most definitive on the subject–because A Scene from Pompeii was unavailable until recently. As one of Alma-Tadema's most ambitious early paintings, it has been in storage at the Museo Nacional del Prado for nearly 100 years. This year A Scene from Pompeii was hung for the first time in the Prado's new, permanent wing dedicated nineteenth-century painting and sculpture.

Alma-Tadema's works, famous for Olympian themes that idealized a bygone empire, may seem more at place in France or Great Britain than in Spain. At the Prado, A Scene from Pompeii makes strange bedfellows with a generation of nineteenth-century Spanish artists who sometimes trained in France, but nonetheless venerated classical realists like Diego Velázquez and José de Ribera.

This painting is one of only a handful of foreign nineteenth-century works in the Prado's collection. It was donated to the short-lived, Spanish Museo de Arte Moderno in 1887 by Ernesto Gambart, then Spanish Consul to Nice (France). When the Museo de Arte Moderno was absorbed into the Prado a few years later, nearly all of the its collections, including this work by Alma-Tadema, were placed in storage where they have been ever since. Only now, under the  leadership of Javier Barón, Director of Nineteenth-Century Painting at the Prado, are these works being fully restored and finally displayed.

A Scene from Pompeii (1868) dates to a happy and prolific period in Alma-Tadema's life. Five years earlier, he married his first wife, Marie-Pauline Gressin, in Antwerp. Their honeymoon was spent in Florence, Rome, Naples and Pompeii. For the next several years, he absorbed and transmuted his personal experience with the classical tradition into a series of paintings that quoted Greco-Roman architecture and artworks, such as a bronze reproduction of Aphrodite by the Greek sculptor Praxiteles (4th-century BC), in this work.

Alma-Tadema is often remembered for his British works created after the death of his wife in 1869. These exquisitely detailed scenes sometimes feature dozens of figures painted in jewel-like colors.  However, before 1869, his works regularly exhibited the same restricted, earth-tone palette of A Scene of Pompeii. While this painting shares the trademark precision Alma-Tadema's larger oeuvre, its composition is unusual. I am not an expert on Alma-Tadema; but, I am surprised by the Baroque proportions of the figures which, unlike other works by Alma-Tadema, fill the canvas to near capacity.

It is always a pleasure to find new works by an artist as well-known and respected as Sir Alma-Tadema. I am sure that the Prado will have more insightful and important things to say about the painting as the new nineteenth-century wing becomes more public.