Tag: archives

Cranach’s ‘Johann’ and Art Historical Knowledge at the Met

~ James Moske

This is the second of three pieces related to provenance research that we are publishing in conjunction with the 6th German/American Provenance Exchange Program (PREP) in Washington, DC.

In 1908, The Metropolitan Museum of Art purchased from the French art dealer Kleinberger Galleries a sixteenth-century portrait believed to be that of Johann, Duke of Saxony, painted by Lucas Cranach the Elder. The Museum’s paintings curator, Roger Fry, had learned of the availability of this little-known work by the German Renaissance master late in 1907, and through correspondence with Kleinberger confirmed its provenance and attribution, which were attested by the eminent art historians Max Friedländer and Wilhelm von Bode. The picture crossed the Atlantic on the Courraine, arrived at the Met on February 3, and was installed in its galleries soon after. It was the first work by Cranach the Elder in the Metropolitan’s collection.

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What Rumors Have Taught Me about Knowledge

~ Sebastian Jobs

Rumors have interested me for a long time—not merely the occasional bits of chatter from my work life but rumors as historical phenomena. In my second semester of undergraduate studies, one of my professors mentioned in passing that the rumor about Christopher Columbus’s return from his first voyage travelled from the Iberian Peninsula to Paris faster than the actual messenger dispatched with the news. Although I have never found any confirmation of that story, it continues to resonate. With that professor’s comment, I began saving any article about rumors I ran across to my computer for future use.

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Towards a History of Missionary Knowledge? Impressions from the Conference ‘Mapping Entanglements’

~ Elisabeth Engel

On February 10 and 11, we held a conference entitled “Mapping Entanglements: Missionary Knowledge and ‘Materialities’ across Space and Time (16th–20th centuries).” Broadly speaking, the conference posited that what we know about missionaries is not the same as what we know from missionaries, and it aimed to examine the history of the latter under the rubric of “missionary knowledge.” Accordingly, conference participants explored how missionaries produced knowledge as well as how this knowledge traveled and transformed from generation to generation and location to location. By tracing a wide variety of missionaries’ cultural productions, including writings, maps, drawings, and collections of objects, participants mapped the terrains in which missionary knowledge transpired—within, but also beyond the purview of the distinct missions in which it originated.

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