Lovers and Saints: Art of the Italian Renaissance

Museum of Art Museum of Art

Exhibition: Lovers and Saints: Art of the Italian Renaissance

Dates:

Location:

Markell Gallery
Focusing on the artistic innovations of the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries, this exhibition makes apparent why contemporaries could celebrate a rebirth or Renaissance of the art of classical antiquity

Selected Works

Jacopo da Carrucci (called Pontormo), “Apollo and Daphne,” 1513, oil on canvas. Gift of the Samuel H. Kress Foundation.

About

Focusing on the artistic innovations of the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries, this exhibition makes apparent why contemporaries could celebrate a rebirth or Renaissance of the art of classical antiquity. On view are selections from the Kress Collection, as well as more recent additions to the collections.

Learning from ancient reliefs and sculpture and studying ancient literary sources, artists of the Italian Renaissance discovered new themes and reinterpreted iconographic standards. The observation and interpretation of nature became a guiding principle of these artists, who studied and captured visual phenomena and began to relate the painted space to the viewer’s perception.

This gallery brings together works that suggest the various functions that the visual arts served during the Renaissance. They range from a sketch produced in the studio, to decorative paintings for furniture and festivals, to paintings for private and public devotion. They also include prints that were used to make the creations of artists such as Raphael, Michelangelo, and Titian known to wider audiences.

RELATED PROGRAMMING


October 28, 2014 | 12:00 noon
Gallery Conversation: “Anatomy of a Renaissance Painting”
Nina Roth-Wells, an independent paintings conservator, and Andrea Rosen, curatorial assistant at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art, discuss the creation and restoration of 15th-century Italian tempera on panel paintings in the Museum’s installation of Renaissance art, Lovers and Saints: Art of the Italian Renaissance.