Collecting Central Europe  
  The History of Collecting of Central and Eastern Europe  

Collector’s Cabinet arranged by Georg Laue after historic record, photo credit: Kunstkammer Georg Laue, Munich / London.

 

Programme 2024



19 March

kunstkammer workshop with presentations by Kirstin Kennedy (V&A) and Deanna Shemek (University of California, Irvine)

Two ten-minute presentations followed by discussion

Kunstkammer Reconstructions

The Medici Studiolo at the V&A

In December 2009 the new Medieval and Renaissance Galleries at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum opened to the public. Among the objects redisplayed were 12 roundels depicting the ‘Labours of the Months’ from the workshop of Luca della Robbia (ca. 1450-56), commissioned by Piero de’ Medici for his studiolo in the Palazzo Medici, Florence. The study, said by contemporaries to inspire the greatest admiration in anyone who entered, was destroyed during reconstruction of the Medici palace in 1659. The redisplayed roundels in the V&A galleries reflect their original position and context in a gallery that explores fifteenth and sixteenth century intellectual and artistic ideals in Western Europe.’
Kirstin Kennedy is curator of metalwork 1450-1900 at the V&A, and was part of the concept team responsible for the Medieval and Renaissance Galleries.


Reassembly and Imagination: The Virtual Studiolo of Isabella d'Este
The famed studiolo of Isabella d'Este (d. 1539) in Mantua survives as an architecturally altered, nearly empty space within the city's Museum of the Ducal Palace, while  objects that once filled the spaces of the grotta and studiolo  now reside in museum collections,  in spaces not remotely resembling the rooms where their original collector housed them. The Virtual Studiolo project within Isabella d'Este Archive offers a virtual, immersive context--a digital thought experiment--in which to imagine the collection reassembled. This presentation will discuss challenges, solutions, and future options for the project.

Deanna Shemek is Professor of Italian and European Studies at the University of California, Irvine.  She is author of Ladies Errant: Wayward Women and Social Order in Early Modern Italy (1998) and of In Continuous Expectation: Isabella d’Este’s Reign of Letters (2021). Her collaborative editing includes Phaethon’s Children: The Este Court and its Culture in Early Modern Ferrara (2005), Writing Relations: American Scholars in Italian Archives (2008), and Itinera chartarum: 150 anni dell’Archivio di Stato di Mantova (2019). She edited and co-translated Adriana Cavarero’s Stately Bodies: Literature, Philosophy, and the Question of Gender (1995). Her edition and translation of the Selected Letters of Isabella d'Este (2017) won the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women’s 2018 prize for the best translation of a woman’s work. She co-directs IDEA: Isabella d'Este Archive, an online project for study of the Italian Renaissance.


30 April

Jelena Todorovic (University of Arts, Belgrade)

lecture of 40 minutes followed by discussion

Prince Paul and the Prince of Dealers

On the Role of Prince Paul Karadjordjevic as collector and Joseph Duveen as a major art dealer in the creation of the State Art Collection of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia.
The history of collecting in Europe and even more in the America of the 1920s and 1930s would be impossible to imagine without the figure of Joseph Duveen. Very little is known, however, about the decisive role he played in the creation of the State Art Collection in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia (1929-1938) and the influence he had on the politics of collecting of this newly-founded country on the Balkans. This presentation aims to shed more light not only on the role of Joseph Duveen in the foundation of the State Art Collection, but also on the rarely discussed collaboration and friendship between Prince Paul of Yugoslavia and Joseph Duveen. This most successful “joint venture” between a Royal Prince and a Prince of Dealers profoundly shaped the State Art Collection (SAC). It also made possible the foundation of the Museum of Modern Art in Belgrade and of Prince Paul’s personal collection. The SAC, comprising European and Yugoslav works of art, had a rich and a curious history which is an integral, albeit neglected, part of the European cultural history of the twentieth century. It was symbolically founded in 1929 on connection with the proclamation of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, and works of art were added to it until the late 1970s, prior to the death of President Tito. Although by its contents and its historical importance the SAC forms a notable part of the European and Yugoslav cultural heritage, this collection was never fully researched and was virtually unknown outside, and even within the borders of the former Yugoslavia. It was for the first time in 2014 that a complete Catalogue of the fine arts collection of the SAC in Belgrade was printed and its works of art were finally made available to the wider local and European audience.

Jelena Todorovic studied Art History (1993-1998) at the Faculty of Philosophy in Belgrade before gaining her MA and PhD at University College London (UCL – 1998-2004), where she worked as a teaching assistant and part-time lecturer. In 2005, she transferred to the University of the Arts in Belgrade where she presently teaches in the Faculty of Fine Arts as an Associate Professor.
Although an art historian by training, her interests have always been more directed towards early-modern cultural history, including the fields of festival culture, of art and propaganda, concepts of time and transience, and the understanding of liminal spaces in the visual arts. She teaches at undergraduate and postgraduate levels, with the aim of introducing the approach of cultural history and interdisciplinary, which are so important for future artists and theoreticians.