Naarden Celebrates Handel: A Month of Music, History, and Discovery
This autumn, the city of Naarden will be immersed in the world of one of the most iconic composers of the Baroque era: Georg Friedrich Handel (1685–1759). From October 10 to November 10, the first-ever Dutch Handel Days will take place, a unique collaboration between the Comenius Museum Naarden, the internationally acclaimed organist, harpsichordist, and conductor Ton Koopman, and the Dutch Handel Society.
The festival offers a rich program of concerts, masterclasses, and a special exhibition at the Comenius Museum titled Handel in Naarden. From the Collection of Ton Koopman. Visitors will have the rare opportunity to view unique prints, manuscripts, and personal objects from Koopman’s private collection—including an authentic harpsichord from his own home. These items tell the story of Handel’s life, his musical genius, and his enduring influence on the Baroque tradition.
Children are invited to explore Handel’s world through a playful musical treasure hunt, designed to spark curiosity and creativity while introducing them to the composer’s extraordinary works.
Ton Koopman (born in Zwolle, 1944) is a leading authority on Baroque music and historical performance practice. With his Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra & Choir, he has produced numerous landmark recordings of Handel and Bach, earning international recognition for his scholarly and artistic contributions.
Throughout the Handel Days, a variety of events will take place in collaboration with the Dutch Handel Society and Ton Koopman. These include concerts and masterclasses featuring Koopman and the Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra. For the full program, visit the Dutch Handel Society’s website: Händeldagen – Nederlandse Händelvereniging.
The museum will also host exclusive guided tours led by Ton Koopman and Anna Bianco (curator of the Ton Koopman collection) on October 18 and 29, and November 8. These tours offer a deeper insight into the exhibition and the historical context of the works on display.
Whether you're a seasoned music lover or a curious newcomer, the Dutch Handel Days in Naarden promise an inspiring journey into the life and legacy of one of music history’s greatest figures.

"The Goncourt Brothers and the Language of Etching" explores the significant and often surprising links between printmaking and literature during the nineteenth-century French etching revival. This book offers a fresh perspective on the revival through the work of Edmond and Jules de Goncourt: novelists, diarists, art historians, collectors, and etchers.

Using an interdisciplinary approach that centers the embodied process of both etching and writing, "The Goncourt Brothers and the Language of Etching" identifies new intersections between word and image in the Goncourts' wide-ranging work. From the brothers' etched illustrations for their groundbreaking history of eighteenth-century French art, to their efforts to translate techniques from printmaking into their experimental prose, each chapter offers a close analysis of printed image and printed text. This book not only brings critical attention to the brothers' understudied work as printmakers, but also provides new insight into pressing questions about the purpose and value of creative labor in nineteenth-century France.

Illustrated publications and the role of market forces in shaping representations of Egypt at a time when European colonial interests in the region were at their peak, with 80 color and black and white illustrations.

In the nineteenth century, following Napoleon Bonaparte’s 1798 campaign in Egypt, new possibilities of travel and improvements in printing technology saw an emergence of publishing ventures in France and Britain dedicated to the production of albums and travel accounts featuring images of Muslim Egypt and Islamic architecture and catering to a growing European fascination with the East.

Visualizing Egypt analyzes the context and process of production of these highly illustrated publications, from their conceptualization to the finished product and its afterlife, from marketing to the sales of these books, and from circulation to their reception by nineteenth-century audiences. By tracing the long, arduous, and often risky publishing journeys of the makers of these books, including publishers, writers, and artists, such as the Frenchman Émile Prisse d’Avennes, Paulina Banas reveals a complex terrain of changing market demands, collaborations, and conflicting views, and the unsettled authorship of these works, prompting us to think more profoundly about artistic and intellectual exchange in the world of nineteenth-century Orientalist book production.

Visualizing Egypt considers nineteenth-century book illustrations on Egypt and the “Orient” not merely as expressions of enduring ideology and colonial propaganda, but as representations shaped by the often-overlooked commercial exigencies of the growing publishing industry and the reckless competition within it.

“Artistic printing techniques” consists of two high-quality boxes containing 45 original prints and
explanatory texts available in German, French or English. a general introduction to the relief, intaglio,
planographic and screen- printing techniques, as well as detailed explanations of the 19 processes
employed to produce each individual print.
The artist, Marcel Gähler, created this collection of original prints using the same subject of a dog
lying down to illustrate 19 different techniques. The graphic arts specialist, Hildegard Homburger,
contributes explanatory texts describing the techniques and the characteristics and distinguishing
features of each process. Together they provide a descriptive basis for studying the subject and
identifying the most important printmaking techniques.
For more information, please contact the publisher Michael Rothe: mail@rothe-drucke.ch
https://www.rothe-drucke.ch/de/landing.html

The Society of Antiquaries of London’s collection of one hundred and seventy historical printing plates, dating from the early eighteenth to mid-nineteenth centuries, has long been a hidden gem. This paper presents the results of a research project initiated in 2022, focusing on the provenance, manufacture and bibliographical use of these plates. It explores the evolution of printing practices and the role of coppersmith stamps, shedding light on production methods and industry connections. The project involved digitising the plates for improved accessibility and preservation and cataloguing efforts to establish standardised guidelines for similar collections. Furthermore, the study uncovers the Society’s historical interest in maintaining and utilising these plates, providing valuable insights into past printing practices and collection management. This research enriches our understanding of the Antiquaries’ holdings through meticulous investigation and documentation and underscores the significance of exploring overlooked aspects of historical collections. It also calls for future research endeavours and collaborations to explore connections within the Society’s collections further and expand our knowledge of printing history. Overall, this study emphasises the importance of preserving and studying printing technology as valuable artefacts that contribute to our understanding of the past.

Essay-like publication (not an exhibition catalogue per se) on the exhibition held at the Spanish National Library "Arte y anatomía en el Renacimiento. Juan Valverde de Amusco y la Historia de la composición del cuerpo humano" (November 2024-March 2025).

A PDF of the book is available for free at the BNE website (see link below)

A world of academic discourse that shares knowledge through word and image frames this Phd thesis in which I explore the relationship between stone lithography and language - ‘language’ being understood here in its widest sense as written text, embodied, vocal and tacit communication, symbolic and excess information, visual image, and the means through which thought becomes manifest and subjectivity is expressed. At the core of the inquiry is the artisanal practice of stone lithography: a technology that led the development of printed communications in the nineteenth century as both a method of mass communication, and an emerging artists’ technique. Invented by the Bavarian playwright Alois Senefelder (1771-1834), stone lithography had a significant impact on the world of music publishing, and I draw on this lyrical inheritance of song, dance and spoken word. I also draw on the dark legacies of colonialism that laid the ground for the development of lithography in the Age of Empire. In the light of these historic contexts, my own studio practice, and a transdisciplinary field of knowledge, this collection of texts explores the multi-modal breadth of lithographic language making and demonstrates the heterogenous nature of the languages engendered by the practices of stone lithography.

In this essay, I argue that Raphael’s double portrait of Agostino Beazzano and Andrea Navagero formed the painter’s fullest response—made in purely pictorial terms—to Renaissance prosody as it was then being developed by his friends, especially the portraits’ sitters and Pietro Bembo. The drafts of Raphael’s own sonnets on drawings made while he was painting the Stanza della Segnatura are visualizations of the intellectual labor his poetic compositions entailed. A close looking at their placement across the paper on these “ekphrastic sheets” (to use Francesco Di Teodoro’s term) as well as changes in the sonnets’ texts offer tools for understanding the double portrait of Raphael’s poet-friends. Raphael’s often dismissed efforts at poetry made on these study drawings thus blossomed half a decade later in the contribution to Renaissance literary theory he made as a painter.