From Botticelli to Titian
Another Leonardo at the Museum of Fine Arts
MúzeumCafé 13.
The masterpiece Lady with an Ermine, painted by Leonardo da Vinci in the second half of the 1480s, is coming to Budapest from the Czartoryski Museum in Cracow. The exhibition, entitled From Botticelli to Titian, spans two centuries and includes works of art by the best masters. The earliest of the approximately 130 paintings is a work of Paolo Uccello, who represents the first generation of Florentine Early Renaissance; the latest, a painting by Ventura Salimbeni of Sienna, is from 1606. The numerous artists represented include: Pesellino, Baldovinetti, Signorelli, Filippino Lippi, Domenico and Davide Ghirlandaio, Leonardo da Vinci, Neroccio dei Landi, Boccati, Mantegna, Marco Zoppo, Michele Pannonio, Carlo Crivelli, Francesco del Cossa, Antonello da Messina, Giovanni Bellini, Bartolomeo Montagna, Cima da Conegliano, Vittore Carpaccio, Mansueti, Bramantino, Cesare da Sesto, Francesco Melzi, Franciabigio, Francesco Francia, Perugino, Raffaello, Giorgione, Lotto, Dosso and Battista Dossi, Girolamo da Carpi, Palma Vecchio, Moretto da Brescia, Jacopo Bassano, Tintoretto, Veronese, Pontormo, Beccafumi, Parmigianino, Passerotti, Arcimboldo, Luca Cambiaso and Federico Barocci.
The first part of the display, The Science of Painting, includes works which illustrate the thesis of Leon Battista Alberti in that they show how significant the theory of perspective was in the practice of painting. The section Human Faces, Angels’ Faces on the one hand presents portraits which most clearly confirm the cult of the individual during the Renaissance and, on the other, displays some works by Botticelli and from his workshop, as well as by Raffaello, which demonstrate that the endeavour to be faithful to nature coexisted with the desire for ideal beauty. The third section, Renaissance Without Borders, reveals that the door was open to the Gothic throughout the whole era. Relations were maintained not only between the Italian cities and the country’s artistic workshops but also between Italian trends and those beyond the Alps, and – last but by no means least – that artistic imagination had no limits.
The fourth part of the exhibition, High Renaissance, presents its main masters: Leonardo, Raffaello, Correggio and the young Michelangelo, even though no painting by the latter is displayed since Doni Tondo, Michelangelo’s only potentially movable work of the period, never travels anywhere for understandable reasons. However, Leonardo’s Lady with an Ermine is displayed here, as well as Raffaello’s Double Portrait.
The fifth part of the exhibition is closely connected to the fourth and is entitled Titian: the Triumph of Painting. This section includes works of the leading Venetian masters of the High Renaissance, Giorgione and Titian. A separate section is justified for them by the fact that the museum was able to borrow eight paintings by Titian to add to its own Portrait of Marcantonio Trevisani. The Venice and its Hinterland section shows that it was when its political power began to decline in the 16th century that the city on the Adriatic became a superpower in painting. It was at this time that Tintoretto created a passionate, whirling and dynamic style imbued with popular religiosity and when Paolo Veronese became the last representative of Late Renaissance. The seventh, final part is The Crisis of Renaissance and Mannerism. Here Jacopo Pontormo’s Madonna with Child and St. John would be enough to show that the shaken optimistic world view of humanism was still able to nurture wonderful flowers. In addition, works by Beccafumi, Parmigianino, Lelio Orsi and Bronzino all show that during the 16th century the balance between fidelity to realism and abstraction, worldly spirit and transcendent thinking, in various degrees broke down in favour of the latter. Thirty works are from the Museum of Fine Arts’ own collection. The holdings of the museum are rather rich in the works of Giovanni Bellini’s followers, but the institution does not own a single painting by Bellini himself. For this exhibition two have been loaned, one from Venice another from Bergamo. Two pieces by Jacopo Sellaio well demonstrate Botticelli’s spirituality, but paintings by Botticelli himself have also been sent to the exhibition, as have works by Andrea Mantegna, himself the leading master of the Padova quattrocento. Thalia by Michele Pannonio of the School of Ferrara (who also happened to be of Hungarian origin) is a great pride of the museum. Two panels of an altarpiece are on loan from the Ferrara Gallery. The exhibition catalogue – produced as a result of cooperation with an international research team – includes new scientific findings, which will undoubtedly be of interest for professionals. The assumption that Portrait of a Boy held in Madrid’s Thyssen Bornemisza collection was painted by Girolamo di Giovanni da Camerino is articulated here for the first time. MuseumCafe has previously published an article about the Vasari attribution of a tondo rediscovered in the Móra Ferenc Museum in Szeged. That was ascertained by the discovery of a sketch drawing. A painting which turned up in Hungarian art trade in 2008 is being exhibited for the first time, moreover with the definition of its master, Paolo Fiammingo, a Venetian painter of Flemish origin,. Any museologist in charge of an exhibition involving 130 works is hard pressed if asked to specify a favourite. Nevertheless this author has one – St. Augustine by Sandro Botticelli (Uffizi, Florence). It is a work which reveals the prominent master of the second half of Florentine quattrocento in his full artistic prime.