Images of Interest

Half-length portrait of a young woman dressed in a short-sleeved white dress and a shawl in a chair.
Art and Fashion

The first in a series of blog entries focusing on conservation “interventions” as recorded in the holdings of the Frick Art Reference Library Photoarchive is this elegant portrait of Mrs. William Bedlow Crosby attributed to Eliab Metcalf (1785‒1834), which underwent substantial restoration before 1940.

Corner of a room with a section of fresco depicting the head and shoulders of a young blond man.
Piero della Francesca's St. Julian In Situ

In 1956, Thomas Hoving, the former director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, traveled to Sansepolcro, Italy, to study and photograph works by Piero della Francesca (ca. 1415–1492), including a recently discovered fresco in the church of Santa Chiara (formerly Sant’Agostino).

A large room with fifty windows and a ceiling of exposed wooden rafters and beams.
The Allegorical Frescoes of the Palazzo della Ragione, Padua

The theme of this extensive fresco cycle—which is comprised of more than 300 scenes—is human life as regulated by the heavens.

Drawing of a cityscape with fortifications and a temple on a hill at right.
The Parthenon in 1667

This detailed sketch, based on George Wheeler’s topographical drawing of 1667, documents the appearance of the Parthenon just a few years before Venetian forces shelled the Acropolis during the Republic’s struggle to take the city from the Ottomans in 1687.