Van Eyck to Titian Exhibition

Madrid's Museo Nacional del Prado and London's National Gallery are soon to host the landmark exhibition "Van Eyck to Titian: The Renaissance Portrait" in 2008 and 2009.

Van Eyck to Titian: The Renaissance Portrait is scheduled for Madrid's Museo Nacional del Prado (June 3-September 7, 2008) and London's National Gallery (October 15, 2008-January 18, 2009). This international loan exhibition describes the development of portraiture in 15th- and 16th-century Europe both north and south of the Alps.

Some 70 paintings from the Italian and Northern Renaissances are accompanied by relevant drawings, engravings, medals and sculpture.

Artists represented in the presentation include:

• Sandro Botticelli (1444/45-1510);
• Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519);
• Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475-1564);
• Titian (ca. 1488-1576);
• Jan van Eyck (ca. 1380/90-1441);
• Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528);
• Lucas Cranach the Elder (1472-1553); and
• Hans Holbein the Younger (1487/98-1543),

each a master portraitist in his own right.

The complex subjects explored in this exhibition involve:

• likeness, memory and identity;
• how friendship, courtship and marriage influenced portrait commissions;
• artists' self-portraits;
• full-length portraiture; and
• counter-portraits and the anti-ideal in Renaissance art.

Sources:

• Brown, David Alan (ed.), et al. Virtue & Beauty: Leonardo's "Ginevra de' Benci" and Renaissance Portraits of Women (exh. cat.). Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 2001.
• Campbell, Lorne. Renaissance Portraits: European Portrait-painting in the 14th, 15th and 16th Centuries. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990.
• Clayton, Martin. Leonardo da Vinci: The Divine and the Grotesque (exh. cat.). London: The Royal Collection, 2002.