New Rijksmuseum exhibition showcases Renaissance portraits

AMSTERDAM – As COVID-19 lockdowns easiness and borders reopen, determination is simply a gathering astatine Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum of radical from astir Europe, depicted successful much than 100 Renaissance portraits.

The Dutch nationalist museum's caller accumulation “Remember Me,” covers the period 1470-1570 and features portraits from crossed the continent by masters including Albrecht Duerer, Hans Holbein and Titian that underscore humanity's enduring tendency to beryllium remembered.

It besides shows the lengths artists went to to represent people, their wealth, jobs, powerfulness and emotion for 1 another.

While the accumulation has been successful the works since earlier the planetary pandemic swept the satellite past year, the privation to beryllium remembered is thing that felt much pressing than ever amid lockdowns, said the museum's wide manager Taco Dibbits.

“We present felt with the corona situation that radical were truthful acold distant they couldn’t travel to you. You couldn’t travel,” Dibbits said Tuesday. ”That was ever the lawsuit successful the Renaissance, erstwhile it was acold harder to question and ... determination was this large longing to person the idiosyncratic with you. I deliberation thing that we felt implicit the past one-and-a-half years.”

Ad

The amusement offers a snapshot of European nine successful the Renaissance play and includes for the archetypal clip successful a azygous accumulation the 2 earliest idiosyncratic portraits of Black men known successful Europe — a coating by Jan Jansz Mostaert of a antheral successful subject attire who was perchance Christophle le More, a idiosyncratic bodyguard to Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, and a 1508 drawing, "Portrait of an African Man," successful achromatic chalk by Albrecht Duerer that is connected indebtedness from Vienna's Albertina Collection.

For Dibbits, whose depository has conscionable wrapped up a groundbreaking accumulation bringing the past of slavery successful the Netherlands and its erstwhile colonies into crisp focus, the 2 portraits are a mode of bringing Europe's Black colonisation successful the Renaissance retired of obscurity.

“There was a beingness successful the Renaissance, truthful astir 1500, of Africans successful Europe and we felt it precise important to amusement these 2 works, to besides amusement that presence," helium said. “I deliberation that for a agelong clip successful the past of art, these works were invisible. So radical conscionable thought, good they didn’t exist.”

Ad

For Dibbits and Matthias Ubl, the museum's curator of Early Netherlandish, Italian and German painting, 1 of the standout highlights of the amusement is the enigmatic “Portrait of a Young Girl,” painted astir 1470 by Petrus Christus. The representation of an chartless miss is connected indebtedness from the Gemaeldegalerie successful Berlin, the archetypal clip the coating has near the depository since 1994.

Ubl said helium archetypal became fascinated by the enactment erstwhile helium saw it connected a poster arsenic a pupil successful London astir 20 years ago.

“When I archetypal saw it, I thought, ‘wow, this is conscionable truthful amazing. This is 1 of the astir beauteous portraits determination is.’ And present it’s present and it’s astir unreal,” Ubl said.

Getting each the loaned portraits to Amsterdam from museums astir Europe, the United Kingdom and United States, was a feat successful itself astatine a clip of question restrictions. The amusement opens Oct. 1 and runs to Jan. 16.

“We’re incredibly grateful that we got them each together,” Dibbits said. "And it’s truly similar a (re)union, you could say. It was similar existent radical present get backmost unneurotic again and besides these radical from the Renaissance are present present gathered again together.”

Copyright 2021 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This worldly whitethorn not beryllium published, broadcast, rewritten oregon redistributed without permission.