International Art News

Léonard de Vinci, La Vierge à l’Enfant avec sainte Anne. Après restauration. 1503-1519. Huile sur bois. 168 x130 (largeur initiale : 112) cm. Paris, musée du Louvre, Inv. 776 © RMN, musée du Louvre / René Gabriel Ojéda

From March 29, 2012 to June 25, 2012 – Musee du Louvre
Leonardo da Vinci’s masterwork The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne, restored with the aid of the C2RMF (Center for Research and Restoration of the Museums of France), is the centerpiece of an exceptional exhibition that reunites all surviving related works for the first time.

The beginning of the slow and complex genesis of the painting dates back to 1501, when it was first mentioned in Isabella d’Este’s correspondence. Leonardo da Vinci continuously worked to perfect this ambitious composition, left unfinished upon his death in 1519.

Compositional sketches, preparatory drawings, landscape studies and the National Gallery of London’s magnificent cartoon are brought together for the first time since the artist’s death to illustrate his lengthy meditation and expose the succession of solutions he had envisioned.

Léonard de Vinci, Sainte Anne, la Vierge et l’Enfant Jésus bénissant saint Jean Baptiste. Vers 1500. Pierre noire, rehauts de blanc. 141,5 x 104,6 cm. Londres, The National Gallery, NG 6337 © The National Gallery, Londres, Dist. RMN / National Gallery Photographic Department

Other painted artworks by Leonardo are also used to show how the Saint Anne is the true culmination of the artist’s numerous and varied explorations on nature and art.
To reveal the full scale of the artwork’s innovative nature, the exposition also strives to reposition the Saint Anne in the iconographic tradition of its subject (the Virgin and Child with Saint Anne) and demonstrate its considerable influence on Italian art in the early 16th century.

More recent tributes to the artist by Eugène Delacroix, Edgar Degas, and Max Ernst bear witness to the masterpiece’s longstanding influence.

Museum Hours

JENNY SAVILLE Red Stare Head IV, 2006-2011 Oil on canvas 99 3/16 x 73 13/16 inches (252 x 187.5 cm) © Jenny Saville 2011. Courtesy of Gagosian Gallery Photo by Mike Bruce

From September 15 to Saturday, October 22, 2011- Gagosian Gallery – Madison Avenue
Fascinated by the endless aesthetic and formal possibilities that the materiality of the human body offers, Saville remits a highly sensuous and tactile impression of surface and mass in her monumental oil paintings. In the compelling Stare paintings she renders the contours and features of the face and the nuances of skin texture and color in strokes both bold and meticulous. Enlarging the facial features of her human subjects to a vast scale and rendering them in layer upon layer of paint, she imbues in them with a sense of mass and weight that is almost sculptural and at times wholly abstract. Intense pinks, reds, and blues erupt through pale skin tones, disclosing the internal workings of the painting like the flesh and blood of a living organism.

Saville portrays the intimate relationship between mother and child in a series of life-sized drawings directly inspired by Renaissance nativity portraits — in particular Leonardo da Vinci’s cartoon The Virgin and Child with St. Anne and John the Baptist, an atypical scene in which the Virgin contends with a lively Christ-child. In Study for Pentimenti IV (After Michelangelo’s Virgin and Child) (2011), and Componimento inculto (2011), the subjects – a pregnant woman and young child– are recorded in symbiotic flux. Multiple impressions of each figure are drawn, erased, and superimposed again to create studies in simultaneity; the relationship between them is expressed in a series of dynamic poses rather than in static compositions of iconographic order. Through these intricate studies, Saville gives powerful graphic life to the anatomical details and expressive movements that animate and underpin her visceral paintings.

Jenny Saville was born in Cambridge, England in 1970. She studied at the Glasgow School of Art. Her work has been included in exhibitions worldwide including “Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection,” Royal Academy of Arts, London (1997, traveled to Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin and the Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York 1998-1999); “The Nude In 20th Century Art,” Kunsthalle Emden, Germany (2002, traveled to Arken Museum of Modern Art, Copenhagen in 2003); “Painting,” Museo Correr, 50th Biennale di Venezia (2003); “Paint Made Flesh,” Frist Center for the Arts, Nashville (2009, traveled to the Phillips Collection, Washington, DC and Memorial Art Gallery, University of Rochester, Rochester, NY in 2010) and “Eroi,” Galleria d’Arte Moderna, Torino, Italy (2011). Her work was the subject of a solo exhibition at the Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Rome in 2005. Her first solo U.S. museum exhibition will open at the Norton Museum in West Palm Beach, Florida later this year.

Gallery Hours

Follower of Leonardo da Vinci, Madonna and Child with Columbines, about 1490. Oil paint on panel; 19-3/8 x 14- 7/8 in. Denver Art Museum: Gift of the Samuel H. Kress Foundation.

Until the 31st of July 2011 – Denver Art Museum
Cities of Splendor: A Journey Through Renaissance Italy invites visitors to explore more than 50 paintings, textiles and decorative arts that defined the style that became known as the Italian Renaissance. The artworks and sumptuously designed settings create a “passport to travel” to Italy during the late 15th and early 16th centuries. Visitors have the chance to experience the distinctive creative contribution of each featured city to the birth of theRenaissance style.
Coming from the museum’s own collection and select loans, the exhibition is on view at the DAM April 10 through July 31, 2011. Cities of Splendor is included in general museum admission.“We want to transport our visitors to Renaissance Italy, where cities such as Florence, Venice and Milan played a major role in the development of a new artistic style,” said Angelica Daneo, associate curator of painting and sculpture at the DAM. “During the 1400s and 1500s, Italy was not a unified country, but rather a group of independent states with different characters and artistic backgrounds. The exhibition will show how local styles merged with the innovative ideas coming from Tuscany, resulting in unique artistic expressions and lasting examples of Renaissance art.” Cities of Splendor will guide visitors through Florence, Siena, Mantua, Venice and Milan and across the Italian Alps, enabling them to discover and enjoy the richness of the Italian Renaissance – such as the Florentine love for rational perspective and drawing, the Mantuan passion for classical antiquity and the Venetian taste for color and tonalities. The gallery will be a fully immersive experience with Renaissance sights, fabrics and decorative elements.
“I hope our visitors will leave the exhibition with a deeper understanding of the complexity and variety of the Renaissance style,” said Daneo, who researched and wrote a full-color catalogue of the DAM Kress Collection for visitors to further delve into the scholarship behind Cities of  Splendor.

Museum Hours

Egon Schiele, 'Two Women Embracing' (detail), 1915. Pencil, watercolour, gouache. 48.5 x 32.7 cm. Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes, 'Water-carrier' (detail), c.1808-12. Oil on canvas. 68 x 50.5 cm. Museum of Fine Arts, Budapesty .

Until the 12th of  December 2010 – Royal Academy of Arts
European Masterpieces from Leonardo to Schiele
The Royal Academy of Arts presents a major exhibition of works which showcases the breadth and wealth of one of the finest collections in Central Europe. The exhibition features over 200 works and includes paintings, drawings and sculpture from the early Renaissance to the twentieth century. Selected works by artists including Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, El Greco, Peter Paul Rubens, Goya, Edouard Manet, Claude Monet, Egon Schiele, Paul Gauguin and Pablo Picasso are on display, many of which have not previously been shown in the UK. The exhibition comprises works from the Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest, with additional key loans from the Hungarian National Gallery and provides a once in a lifetime opportunity to view these artworks in London.
The show is organised broadly chronologically, with thematic sections which consider the richness of the collections in relation to religious works, mythological subjects, portraiture, still lifes and landscape
painting. The exhibition opens with the dramatic St. Andrew Altarpiece, 1512, from Liptószentandrás,
drawing attention to the wealth of skill and sophistication of early wood carving in Hungary. The work
reflects the influence and exchanges of culture with Northern European painters, sculptors and carvers.
Key works from the early Italian School include rare and exquisite Renaissance bronze sculptures
attributed to Leonardo da Vinci and Andrea Riccio as well as fifteenth-century devotional paintings by
Jacopo Parisati da Montagnana and Liberale da Verona. The Northern European Schools are represented through paintings by Lucas Cranach the Elder and Maerten van Heemskerck. At the heart of the exhibition sits a selection of over eighty Old Master drawings which includes works by Leonardo da Vinci, Albrecht Dürer, Albrecht Altdorfer, Annibale Carracci and Giambattista Tiepolo and ranges from preparatory studies to presentation drawings.
The Italian School remains prominent throughout the galleries dedicated to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and includes religious and mythological paintings by artists including Jacopo Tintoretto and Giovanni Francesco Barbieri (Il Guercino) whilst works by Nicolas Poussin and Laurent de la Hyre highlight the French School. Large scale paintings by Peter Paul Rubens and Jacob Jordaens showcase the Flemish School and the exceptional Spanish collection is displayed through works by El Greco, Goya, Jusepe de Ribera and Bartolomé Esteban Murillo.
The Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest houses the state collection of international art works in Hungary andincludes the Este rházy collection, acquired in 1871. The collection began in the seventeenth century but expanded during the rule of Prince Nikolaus II Esterházy (1765 – 1833) who was primarily responsible fordeveloping the fine collection of Old Master paintings and drawings which is showcased in the exhibition.
One of the highlights of the exhibition is Raphael’s Virgin and Child with St John the Baptist , 1508 (known as The Esterházy Madonna).
Treasures from Budapest: European Masterpieces from Leonardo to Schiele includes still lifes, landscapes and portraits by some of Europe’s finest artists, including works by Royal Academicians Sir Joshua Reynolds, John Constable and Angelica Kauffmann. The exhibition concludes with a showcase of works by Impressionists such as Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and Camille Pissarro and twentieth century artists including Marc Chagall, Pablo Picasso and Egon Schiele alongside works by Hungarian artists such as Károly Ferenczy and József Rippl-Rónai.

Museum Hours

Giuseppe Arcimboldo, Italian, 1526–1593 Spring, 1573 oil on canvas, 76 x 63.5 cm Musée du Louvre, Paris, Département des Peintures © Réunion des Musées Nationaux/Art Resource, NY

September 19, 2010 to January 9, 2011 – National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC
Sixteen examples of the fantastic composite heads painted by Giuseppe Arcimboldo will be featured in this exhibition, their first appearance in the United States. Bizarre yet scientifically accurate, the unusual heads are composed of plants, animals, and objects. Additional works, including drawings by Leonardo da Vinci and Albrecht Dürer, small bronzes, illustrated books and manuscripts, and ceramics, will provide a context for Arcimboldo’s inventions, revealing his debt to established traditions of physiognomic and nature studies

Museum hours

LONDON – Drawings are rarely given the importance they deserve, and very few exhibitions present this discipline, in spite of it being the mother of arts at the beginning of the Renaissance. This exhibit meets the challenge with «absolute» masterpieces such as View of the Arno in pen, both the first landscape drawing in European art and the oldest known work by Leonardo da Vinci (1473). It must be said that the efforts put together to organize this event are colossal, between the funds of the British Museum and the Graphic Cabinet of the Uffizi, in particular this choice of one hundred drawings, including Lorenzo Monaco, Michael-Angelo or Boltraffio that stages the evolution of the genre from 1400 to 1510, between the taste for the line typical of the Florentine school and the appetite for colors of the Venetians.
•Fra Angelico to Leonardo, Italian Renaissance drawings at the British Museum, from 22 April to 25 July 2010.

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