William Laffan previews the exhibition ‘Ireland: Crossroads of Art and Design 1690-1840′ which opens at the Art Institute of Chicago in March
In October 1645 Giovanni Battista Rinuccini, Innocent X’s nuncio, arrived at Kenmare, County Kerry, on his ill-fated mission to guide the Irish Confederacy. In addition to 2,000 muskets, 400 brace of pistols, 2,000 pike heads, 20,000 pounds of gunpowder and large amounts of cash, a member of the papal retinue, Giovanni Alamanno di Stefano, brought a small painting of the Crucifixion by Lucas Cranach, presumably for private devotion. Rinuccini’s mission was a disaster. Even for a Jesuit-educated canon lawyer the intricacies of the political situation and sheer duplicity of its multiple protagonists was overwhelming and on his return to Italy di Stefano wrote a lengthy inscription on the reverse of his Cranach panel detailing how the papal legates had ‘miraculously escaped the mouths of death, undermined by those damned, English, Scottish and Hibernian heretics’ (see Christie’s sale 1136 July 2013, Lot 18 for catalogue entry on this work). Exactly a century later in a quite different cultural exchange between Ireland and Rome, the wealthy brewer Joseph Leeson (soon to be ennobled as 1st Earl of Milltown) was in Italy shopping for paintings, furniture and sculpture to fill his house, then rising, at Russborough, County Wicklow. In Rome he purchased a series of paintings of subject matter notably at variance with the orthodoxy of the Reformed Church, reflecting instead the Mariology and martyrology of the older faith: A Virgin Annunciate, after Reni, a St Agatha, after Guercino, and perhaps least consistent with the low nature of the 18th-century Church of Ireland, a Mystic Marriage of St Catherine by Agostino Masucci and a portrait of Pope Benedict XIII.
Susan Rogers visits woodturner Liam Flynn at his County Limerick studio
In his design for the new Coast Guard Station in Doolin, County Clare, Dominic Stevens has discovered his architecture of the Burren; an architecture of abstract rocks, describing the material nature of place, writes Steve Larkin
