Displaying items by tag: giovanni bellini

Giovanni Bellini’s "St. Francis in the Desert" is a masterpiece of Venetian Renaissance painting that has enthralled visitors to The Frick Collection for generations. The work is also profoundly mysterious, its beauty and depth of detail matched only by the enigma of the artist’s intentions. For centuries, viewers have puzzled over the painting’s meaning—seeking explanations in a variety of pictorial and textual sources. Until now, the artist’s practical conception and realization of this extraordinary picture have remained largely unexplored. The Frick is pleased to announce the publication of "In a New Light: Giovanni Bellini’s St. Francis in the Desert," which presents the collective findings of an unprecedented technical examination of St. Francis in the Desert and offers new understandings of its meaning through an examination of the artist’s process. In 2011, the results of the study were the subject of an acclaimed dossier exhibition of the same name. Published this month by the Frick in association with D Giles Limited, this highly anticipated and beautifully illustrated monograph is edited by Susannah Rutherglen and Charlotte Hale, with contributions by Denise Allen, Michael F. Cusato, O.F.M., Anne-Marie Eze, Raymond Carlson, and Joseph Godla and a foreword by Keith Christiansen.

A traveling exhibition of master paintings by some of the greatest names in European art ends its East Coast summer residency at the Allentown Art Museum on Sunday, September 7. "Of Heaven and Earth: 500 Years of Italian Painting from Glasgow Museums" features works by Italian Renaissance and Baroque masters such as Giovanni Bellini, Sandro Botticelli, Francesco Guardi, Salvator Rosa, and Titian, many of which have never before been exhibited in the United States. This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see these forty major works; after Allentown, the exhibition will travel west to the Milwaukee Art Museum and the Santa Barbara Museum of Art.

Thanks to a generous grant from the Society of the Arts (SOTA), the exhibition is free to all visitors, Wednesday-Saturday 11-4 and Sunday noon-4. “The elimination of our admission fees this summer, and dual-language labels in English and Spanish, are intended to deliver a message that in this, our eightieth anniversary year, the Allentown Art Museum is accessible to all and that we encourage everyone to experience what this extraordinary institution has to offer,” says David Mickenberg, Priscilla Payne Hurd President and CEO of the Art Museum.

Centuries ago, if you wanted to see the paintings of the great Italian masters, you would have embarked on something called The Grand Tour, a kind of traveling educational experience to the principal artistic centers of Renaissance Italy: Rome, Milan, Bologna, Florence, Siena, Naples and Venice.

This summer, The Grand Tour, by way of Glasgow, Scotland, is coming to Allentown.

The Allentown Art Museum of the Lehigh Valley is one of the stops on an once-in-a-lifetime American tour of paintings by some of the greatest names in Italian art. It's a rare opportunity to see the work of artists that quite literally changed the world. And admission will be free, due to an initiative to make the museum more accessible.