Resources & Recommendations #20
Thursday, 1 May 2025. Newsletter 20.
to listen
Pope Francis and art, JMW Turner’s 250th birthday, John Singer Sargent’s Madame X
Following the death of Pope Francis on Easter Monday, The Art Newspaper’s managing editor, Louis Jebb, who has written an extensive obituary of the late pontiff, joined Ben Luke to talk about the late pope’s engagement with art and with the Vatican art collections. The podcast also features an interview with Amy Concannon, the senior curator of historic British art at Tate Britain, about J.M.W. Turner’s enduring appeal, following the 250th anniversary of the artist’s birth on Wednesday 23 April. Luke also discusses John Singer Sargent’s most famous—and in its time, his most infamous—painting, Madame X (1883-84) which is currently on display at the Metropolitan Museum in New York.
to watch
Turner: The Man Who Painted Britain
More parochial Turner ‘content’ in the recommendations section this month. The artist’s 250th anniversary celebrations present a perfect opportunity to revisit a classic 2001 BBC docudrama, presented by Tim Marlow, on the extraordinary story of a brilliant self-made man. While Turner is considered by many to be Britain's greatest landscape painter, his private life reveals a man of extremes and contradictions.
to read
Seven Facets of Architectural Disegno by Cara Rachele
Cara Rachele explores the varied facets of the relationship between disegno (‘drawing’ or ‘design’) and architecture in the Renaissance. Through seven concepts, Rachele explores disegno’s different roles in architectural theory and practice, illuminating the complexities and contradictions of the relationship in reality and imagination, in the conceptual and the material.
