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Collecting art books: the library of Leopoldo Cicognara and his bibliographic system
Full text linkBased on a newly discovered inventory, this article examines the early years of Francesco Leopoldo Cicognara’s book collection. Begun in 1798 as a suitable activity for a diplomat and as a cover for subversive contacts in Masonic circles, the collecting activity is described during the turbulent years between 1798 and 1804. Cicognara’s attitude and interests seem to have changed during these years, so that the focus shifted from purely bibliophilic interests to the content of the books themselves, turning the collection into a scholarly tool for research in art histor
Policy Solutions to the Clean Air Challenge
Full text linkTaking a breath of air is such an instinctive human reaction that we rarely pause to consider how clean our air is, or how clean it could or should be. The quality of the air we breathe is linked to human and ecosystem health, wellbeing, economic productivity and healthcare costs, climate and environmental amenity.
The latest science is now able to characterise the particles and gases in our air in great detail, but also detect pollutant fingerprints that can unequivocally identify emission sources – and hence inform policies to deliver cleaner air. It can also quantify the burden from poor air quality: around 30,000 premature deaths each year in the UK, and up to 7 million globally. This challenge represents a call for action – one which requires integrating insights ranging from technological interventions to governance solutions.
In the follow up from the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26), the University of Birmingham is pursuing research that matters, to address global environmental challenges, including clean air. How clean can our air be? Who is responsible in law – and who is not? Are electric vehicles the solution? How can natural solutions help? What are the secondary consequences of technical interventions?
This edited collection offers a comprehensive examination of the nexus between different disciplines that are important in addressing air pollution, as well as discussion on implementing innovative clear air solutions and their policy implications. Covering a diverse range of topics, including outdoor and indoor pollution, trees, vehicle design and compliance with legal rules on air quality, this collection presents contemporary research to inform evidence-based policy actions relevant to audiences beyond academia, in particular policy makers and industry.
In this publication, we explore some of these questions and many others. We hope that these briefing papers will not only inform the debate, but will also drive progress towards clean air for all, on scales ranging from the domestic to the global
Trees and urban air quality: a briefing note
Full text linkKey messages
1. Trees alone are not the solution to air pollution. They can create a localised positive benefit for air quality by changing the dispersion of pollution, but the amount
of pollution deposited onto trees is not significant on an urban scale.
2. Air pollution can damage trees.
3. Emissions of VOCs from trees can, under the correct conditions, create ozone pollution. This is only relevant when creating new woodlands
Low Emission (Clean Air) Zones - Policy Briefing Note produced by the TRANSITION Clean Air Network
Full text linkLow Emission Zones – also known as Clean Air Zones – aim to achieve compliance with legal air quality objectives by discouraging the use of highly polluting vehicles in urban areas. This briefing note examines current knowledge as to whether these initiatives work, gaps in our understanding and lessons for future place- based air quality solutions.
The TRANSITION Clean Air Network is a UK-wide network, led by the University of Birmingham in collaboration with nine universities and over 20 cross-sector partners, aiming to optimise the air quality and health outcomes of transport decarbonisation; it is funded by UKRI via the UK Clean Air Strategic Priorities Fund, administered by NERC [NE/V002449/1]
Leopoldo Cicognara and his library: Formation and significance of a collection (I)
Full text linkThe influential art library of Count Leopoldo Cicognara (1767-1834) testifies to his scholarship and bibliophilic passions; it testifies equally to his devotion to providing others, artists and scholars alike, with tools for their work. He valued provenance from contemporary collections, such as that of Giuseppe Bossi (1777-1815), or historic collections, such as that of Jacques-Auguste de Thou (1553-1617). Key, however, were personal connections with artists, scholars, librarians, and book dealers, who helped shape Cicognara’s library through donations, advice, and their own connections. To document the construction of Cicognara’s library this study analyses his annotated catalogue and draws on correspondence with friends and colleagues, including Gaetano Pinali (1759-1846), Giovanni de Lazara (1744-1833), Francesco Girolamo Cancellieri (1751-1826), and Giovan Battista Vermiglioli (1769-1848). This documentation deepens our understanding both of Cicognara’s conception of his library and of how it represents the cultural world of northern Italy during the Napoleonic era and its aftermath
Cicognara’s views on fifteenth-century sculpture in light of his art library
Full text linkLeopoldo Cicognara’s (1767-1834) Storia della scultura (Venice, 1813-18; second edition, Prato, 1823-24) is a stylistic history of Italian sculpture from the 14th century to his own time, culminating with Antonio Canova. In writing and then revising his survey, Cicognara relied on the art literature that he collected in his own rich library, as well as on direct knowledge of the works – both essential elements for stylistic classification.
Cicognara divided his history into five epochs. This paper focuses on the second epoch (incremento/progresso), i.e., on sculpture of the 15th century, in order to demonstrate how Cicognara’s specific working method not only enabled him to correct incorrect dating but also to create the first consistent inventory of Italian sculpture. In the process, he established a canon of works which remains valid today. In the chapter on Venetian sculpture, moreover, it becomes clear how much his interest in art history was an expression of his civic, political and cultural commitment
From the reliure mobile to the Schraubband. Collecting and storing prints in adjustable albums at the Kupferstichkabinett in Berlin
Full text linkA large section of the print holdings of the Kupferstichkabinett in Berlin is housed in bulky albums known as Schraubbände (‘screw volumes’). From the outside, these albums are similar to print albums that abounded in private collections before the nineteenth century. But their leaves are not sewn together as in a traditional codex structure; rather, they are screwed together between metal rods. The rods can be unscrewed for easy insertion and removal of the mounted prints, while keeping them in the given order. By investigating material and historical aspects of the Berlin Schraubbände, this paper identifies their forerunners in the reliure mobile-albums in use at the Bibliothèque nationale in Paris, proposes a rationale behind their use at the Kupferstichkabinett in the late nineteenth century, and challenges the traditional discrimination between bound and unbound print collections
Benedetto Croce, ‘A Theory of the Macchia’ trans. Ricardo De Mambro Santos
Full text linkOriginally written in 1905 and included in the volume Problemi di estetica (Questions on Aesthetics), first published in 1910, this short yet dense essay by Benedetto Croce explores the aesthetic and critical implications of the concept of macchia. The starting point of this philosophical investigation is offered by a little-known volume by Vittorio Imbriani, entitled La quinta promotrice (The Promoting Scene), printed in Naples in 1869, in which the author applies the notion of macchia within the emerging ambit of Art Criticism, in reference to the works of Domenico Morelli and, in particular, his Deposition of Christ, of which he provides a detailed, highly evocative and poetic ekphrasis. Defined by Imbriani as the propulsive force, the preliminary idea of every pictorial creation, the concept of macchia will be associated by Croce with one of the foundational notions of his own Aesthetics and set genealogically in relation with the paradigm of intuition as the truly distinctive quality of art in general, beyond any possible differentiation among the particular arts
‘Relays, signals, actuality: a return to Focillon’. Review of: Annamaria Ducci, Henri Focillon en son temps. La liberté des forms, Strasbourg: Presses Universitaires de Strasbourg, 2021, 391 pp., 20 col. plates, 10 b. & w. illus, 26,00 €, ISBN 979-10-344-0079-9
Full text linkA review-essay on Annamaria Ducci’s intellectual biography Henri Focillon en son temps. La liberté des forms (2021) that extends this work by presenting a call for a ‘return to Focillon’ within art historical thought that begins with his ability to refocus us on the artwork itself and its capabilities to magnetize content both within and without its historical milieu. Focillon’s real interest in the concept of a milieu and in the artwork’s ability to escape this originary context instigates a rethinking of the ontology, historiography, and the temporality of art. He challenges us to think and write through problematics, to experiment with both aesthetic agency and historical reception; to create new linkages between art and life, history and becoming, along the ἀκμή of the vie des formes—thus conceiving an artwork as a past-future event, as a ‘great ensemble’. Focillon posits that if the work of art is an event, then history is a modulated and controlled form of time as such, which itself is an actual-virtual movement or ‘becoming’. Ontologically art ‘goes further than…illustrate history’, he argues, which is why art historians must learn to encounter ‘modalities of life’ in order to write about how it creates ‘worlds’. Our ‘return to Focillon’ takes place within a threshold wherein the event of art is what matters most, that is, the capacities of a given formal property to harness and magnetize forces within and outside of itself in order to render humanist and post-humanist forces perceptible, sensible, and thinkable
‘Art historians and their textual behaviour’. Review of: Sam Rose: Interpreting Art, London: UCL Press, 2022, 136 pages, 38 illustrations, ISBN: 978-1-80008-178-9
Full text linkSam Rose’s book analyses techniques that art historians and art critics use when they write about artworks. These techniques concentrate on five ‘features’ of art-theoretical analysis: authors, contexts, reception, complexity and depth. The analysis that Rose presents is based on an exceptionally extensive survey of art historical literature. At the same time, the book leaves it unclear whether these ‘features’ serve the purpose of acquiring and conveying knowledge about artworks or should we assume that they are merely constitutive of art-historical writing without contributing to art historical knowledge or its transmission
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