Birth and Renaissance of Italian drawing
An exhibition that offers to discover the major designers who led the artistic developments of the Italian Renaissance. Pisanello, Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, Michelangelo, Veronese, Correggio… Thanks to research work carried out at the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, in collaboration with international experts and the Fondation Custodia, discoveries have been made about these sheets and some have been reattributed to leading artists such as Pontormo, Federico Zuccari, Aurelio Lomi, or Pellegrino Tibaldi.
The drawings of the precursors of the Italian Renaissance, at the beginning of the 15th century, now rare, are one of the highlights of the collection of the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen. Several studies by Pisanello, Parri Spinelli, or Benozzo Gozzoli introduce the exhibition. From then on, we can see the pre-eminence of Florence and Venice. As the main centres of artistic creation at that time, these schools also dominate the Rotterdam collection. The latter is also world-renowned for its exceptional collection of drawings by Fra Bartolomeo: thirteen sheets out of the 400 that the institution holds are presented in Paris, as the heart of Florentine production. Venice is not to be outdone, and the exhibition brings together its greatest representatives: Vittore Carpaccio, Gentile Bellini, Veronese, Tintoretto and their workshops, as well as that of the Bassano.
Drawings by the three great masters of the Renaissance – Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael and Michelangelo – form the highlight of the exhibition and lead to the works of artists from Rome (Giulio Romano, Sebastiano del Piombo), Emilian (Parmesan, Correggio) and other schools, who assimilated and appropriated the influence of these artists. As an opening, the exhibition ends with the generation of draftsmen active at the end of the 16th century and at the turn of the 1600s, actors of the bella maniera, heralds of the Baroque and Classicism. Among them, the Baroche, the Zuccari, the Cavalier d’Arpin, the Carracci…
