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What was the process by which an antiquity found on the streets of Rome became the subject of a Renaissance engraving? How did engraving preserve the memory of such antiquities as they vanished into the homes of private collectors, were plundered or destroyed? This article focuses on Marcantonio Raimondis Lion Hunt to explore the relationship between ancient sculpture and the medium of print in Raphaels Rome.
This article and checklist present the contents of the Spencer Album of Marcantonio Raimondi prints, long considered to be lost. By examining its composition and tracing its provenance from the Spencer collection at Althorp House to the John Rylands Library, Manchester, we offer new insight into how attitudes toward Marcantonio Raimondi‘s work evolved during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, particularly in Great Britain. Our article also explores Victorian collecting practices and the importance of the graphic arts for Mrs Rylands‘s vision for the Library to be dedicated to her late husband‘s memory.
The abbey of Holy Trinity, Caen, was founded by Mathilda of Flanders, Duchess of Normandy and Queen of England, in June 1066. The abbesses of Holy Trinity are the focus of this study, especially their judicial role and their power to imprison. These rarely discussed aspects of women’s authority are revealed in Manchester, John Rylands Library, GB 133 BMC/66. Produced in 1292 at the meeting of the Exchequer at Rouen, the modest parchment reveals the existence of a prison in Ouistreham, France, under the authority of the abbesses of Holy Trinity. This article engages heretofore unexamined elements of female abbatial authority, jurisdiction and the mechanisms of justice. The preservation of BMC/66 also reflects the documentary imperatives of the women who governed Holy Trinity and fits into a broader context of memory and documentary culture.
In living memory, Manchester was black from air pollution caused by burning coal. Today only fragments of that blackness remain, although its former presence can be inferred from precautions taken at the time to protect buildings from soot. At Canal Street in Miles Platting the colouring caused by consuming coal was blue, the result of contamination with a by-product of the purification of coal-gas. It is argued that because the blue street can be seen as beautiful then so can the black walls, which should be treated as an authentic part of the city. The most significant remains are 22 Lever Street and the inner courtyards of the Town Hall, which ought to be preserved in their dirty state.
Celebrated as a leader of London’s ‘Underground’ in the 1960–70s, and a leading British poet and performance artist of his time, Jeff Nuttall found fame through his critique of post-nuclear culture, Bomb Culture, which provided an influential rationale for artistic practice through absurdism but lost that recognition a decade or so later. Less well recognised, and with greater influence, is the distinctively visceral sensibility underlying much of his creative work, notably his poetry that draws on Dylan Thomas and the Beat Movement, his graphic drawing and luscious painting styles, and his pioneering performance art. This article argues that it is through these artistic expressions of visceral intelligence that Jeff Nuttall’s art and its long-term influence can now best be understood. It is intended to complement the Jeff Nuttall Papers in the Special Collections of The John Rylands Research Institute and Library, University of Manchester, deposited by the gallerist and poetry publisher Robert Bank (1941–2015), to whose memory this article is dedicated. Further papers have been added by Nuttall’s friends and relatives.